These things do not exist

This is part of my series on debugging the ontological argument.

In the previous post in the series, I explained why existence is not a predicate.  Or if it is a predicate, then it is tautological and meaningless.

However, here is a rebuttal in song form (song starts at 1:35):



My transcript:

Perfect circles, three-sided squares, and two nested pairs with just one number,
Isaac Newton's fourth law of motion, rivers and oceans on the moon,
Easter Sunday in the fall, and Pope John Paul the sixth or seventh,
Also the last digit of pi, or large dragonflies that eat baboons.

Or what about elves and unicorns, or cranberries grown with pairs of thorns,
Or trash double cheesecakes laced with thorns, these things do not exist.
And don't forget objectivity, and non-oppressive authority,
Or equal opportunity, these things do not exist.

I'm quite impressed with our little list, though I think we missed a thing or two,
So not to sound too over-rehearsed, but we'll sing more verses after this.

So what about life without suffering, or a moment when nobody's dying, or a
Flower immune from withering, oh these things do not exist.
Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, American nuclear arms reduction,
Women safe from my powers of seduction, these do not exist.

Or restaurants in California where you legally can smoke, or pitless peaches, orange celery, or heartless artichokes,
or Chia pets that look like Howard Taft or Howard Stern, the Antarctic Badminton League, or gasoline that does not burn.
Or lengthy treatises on existential thought by dinosaurs, or belly-button-flavored jello, Japanese conquistadors,
September 33rd or 50th or 91st, or flying submarines, or talking plants, or meatless liverwurst.

Or oceanfront property in Zimbabwe, Orthodox Jews that speak God's name Yahweh,
Truffles or mushrooms with vertebrae, these things do not exist.
Or cellular phones from 1910, or monsters in closets, or boogeymen,
or cigarettes without carcinogens, these things do not ex--

Eggs as large as Mars, cherry-flavored cars, ninety string guitars, immortal
armadillos, paint chip pillows, billion kilo cigarillos, real Fox News sans point of views, or fake tattoos held on with screws, or duct tape zoos, or argon shoes, or cheap canoes made from kazoos, or free shampoos from kangaroos,
twelve-handed clocks, magic beanstalks, woodless woodblocks, NASA space walks on Earth, or sock puppets made without any actual socks.

One-line sonnets, eight-legged snakes, and beer-flavored lakes in Minnesota,
Cat-scan goggles, monks singing chants in tight leather pants, and
Finally not least of all, an utterly exhaustive list of things that don't exist!

The above song was inspired by a lovely Dinosaur Comic.

If existence is not a predicate, how do any of the above statements make sense?  Read on to find out.

Geek cultural hegemony

In the past few weeks, I've been referring to various nerd/geek narratives.  There's the narrative that nerds are socially awkward,  particularly around women.  There's the narrative of being the smart person in your social group.  And there's the narrative of having very geeky niche interests.

There are certain advantages to having "popular" interests.  You have a much easier time finding other people who want to talk about your interests.  A lot more money is devoted to developing products related to your interests.  If you like popular music, you can expect it to be played in retail outlets and nightclubs.  So on and so forth.

What are "geek" interests?  There isn't any precise definition, but we have a wide array of prototypes.  There's sci-fi.  Fantasy.  Anime.  Trading card games.  Dungeons and Dragons.  Video games.  Comic books.  Science.

At some earlier point in time, all of these things were niche interests, primarily loved by geek subcultures.  However, "geek" does not necessarily imply "niche", and so they may persist in being geeky, even if they do not persist in being niche.  In fact, it seems like several of the prototypes I listed are now quite popular.

Blockbuster films have very high budgets, and must be supported by a very popular consumer base.  The infographic on the right is a list of upcoming comic book movies from IO9.  I also show GTAV, one of the best-selling video games of all time, and also one of the most expensive.

If something like Lord of the Rings has vastly more cultural currency than it once did, you might guess that most of the new fans are no longer from the geek subculture.  But so what?  That's what cultural hegemony is.  Even people who are not part of your subculture now feel compelled to recognize the value of your subculture's interests.  Your interests are now popular, and you gain all the associated advantages.  Good for you.

If I sound unsympathetic, it's probably because my biggest geeky interests have not attained a similar degree of popularity.  I'm mostly a math geek.  I like game theory, set theory, real analysis, origami, and logic puzzles.  I have been incidentally interested in sci-fi, but I've never been particularly enthusiastic about it.

From SMBC

One of the antitheses of geek culture is football culture.*  Stereotypically, geeks dislike football, which is fair enough.  Football is injurious to its players, a waste public resources, and most unforgivable of all, incredibly boring.  But most things that have cultural hegemony are obnoxious when they don't personally interest you. 

*That's American football, to all the non-US people.

Maybe it's just because I talk to more geeks than sports fans, but I personally think sci-fi fans are far more obnoxious than football fans.  I can't count the number of times I've been told that I absolutely must see Star Wars, and must read Lord of the Rings or Dune or whatever.  I'm kind of reactionary about it.  I tell people that I actively dislike the "classics".  (Since I'm ace, I privately draw a comparison between the cultural dominance of sci-fi and the cultural dominance of sex.)

Click for bigger original, from XKCD.  My reaction to this comic was that I'd prefer it if people were neither obligated to listen to football, nor to geeky interests they don't care about.  For instance, my dear readers are never forced to read every part of my blog.

Perhaps one of the worst examples of geek cultural hegemony is in video games.  Because the video game market has space for relatively few big-budget games, geeks are incredibly possessive of the medium.  Something like two thirds of US households play video games, and yet geeks complain endlessly that it doesn't count because they aren't the right kinds of video games (because they're casual, or indie, or Call of Duty, or sports games, or Nintendo).  This amounts to having cultural hegemony, and yet still complaining that it's not nearly enough.

Geeks are frequently defined by their opposition to popular culture and appreciation of more niche cultures.  But now that geeks are taking over popular culture, the question is, have geeks learned anything whatsoever about how to be popular without being an asshole about it?

Writing a novel: Month 7

This month I made modest progress on my book, finishing a few chapters.  I stalled for a bit while writing a chat log between the narrator and protagonist.  The narrator lies a lot, so the chat logs serve the purpose of being more reliably true.

Let me take this opportunity to talk about one of my major inspirations.  Let me tell you about Homestuck.  Explaining Homestuck to people is an exercise in absurdity and futility, so much so that "Let me tell you about Homestuck" has become a meme.  But it will help that I'm not actually trying to convince anyone to read Homestuck, I'm just trying to explain what it is.  (See the author's explanation for a more persuasive effort.)

Homestuck is a webcomic, and an epic satire of video games and the internet.  Unlike most webcomics, it makes full use of its online medium, including animations, music, hyperlink shenanigans, flash games, and more.  And Homestuck is really really long, longer than the entirety of Harry Potter, and more dense too.  Despite the high barrier to entry, it is extremely popular, with a very active fandom.  Most notably, Homestuck fans were able to raise 2.5 million dollars for a spinoff video game.

I've been reading Homestuck since the beginning in 2009, although I don't really participate in the fandom.  I honestly think Homestuck is one of the greatest works of my generation.  But I'm not trying to sell you on it, so I don't feel the need to explain all many great things about it.  I'm just going to pull out one aspect that I find inspirational.

Homestuck captures the modern communication age better than any other work of fiction I have ever read.  Homestuck is about a bunch of kids who live across the world, but who can nonetheless be close friends, through the medium of instant chat.  They are all excited to play a video game which promises, among other things, to provide a means for them to meet each other.  As someone who spends a lot of the time on the internet, that's touching.

Aside from that, all the characters, the humor, and the entire aesthetic of the comic has clearly been shaped by the internet age.  It's a world where people can have really obscure hobbies, where writing style blends into personal identity, and where ideas are often imported from the fandom.

The ways that other works of fiction deal with the communication age doesn't even come close.  Just think of all those movie plots that rely on no one having a cell phone.  If we can't handle cell phones, how will we ever handle smartphones?  And think of all those google-search and email montages.  Who thought those were a good idea?

Even cyberpunk.  I haven't read much cyberpunk, because it kind of makes me angry, but from what I can tell, it's based on a bunch of tropes that were attempts to predict what the computer age would look like in the future.  I read part of Snow Crash (and then stopped, because the hacker hero archetype really annoys me), which envisioned an internet a bit like Second Life.  That's nice, but I'd like to see more fiction with the benefit of hindsight.

I started talking about Homestuck because I mentioned that I was writing some chat logs.  Honestly, the idea of fictional chat logs is so closely associated with Homestuck for me, that it makes me feel like an imitator.  And a poor one at that, since I'm pretty sure I'll never be as good a writer as Andrew Hussie.  On the other hand, I would really like to see modern communication and its aesthetics to become more common in fiction, to the point where it no longer feels like an imitation of any particular work.

Tumblr is full of lies

In the past, I've been a vocal critic of Tumblr, particularly the reblogging format.  But in the past few years I've been "observing" Tumblr, much as a conservative politician might "observe" gay culture by going to gay night clubs every weekend in search of hookups.  As a result, I have a more refined critique of Tumblr.

For instance, I now see the strength of Tumblr: new blog discovery.  Finding new blogs is so easy that you'll find new blogs even if you don't want to.

On the other hand, reblog discussions are even more awful than I previously imagined.  You might as well try to argue with people over Twitter.

I also have an entirely new critique based on the content of Tumblr.  Tumblr will distort your perception of reality.

A typical discussion on Tumblr might consist of one person making a "politically incorrect" statement, and a bunch of people "calling it out" as just one more example of how messed up our societal attitudes are.  While people reject the politically incorrect statement, they simultaneously accept another hidden assumption: that the opening post represents "what people think".  Sometimes the opening post represents no such thing, but rather represents just one person.

Since the inception of the internet, people have complained that it doesn't really represent "what people think".  When there's no accountability, people become assholes.  Trolls are rampant.  The voices of extremists drown out moderates.  So on and so forth.

An excerpt from an SMBC comic

But upon further thought, doesn't the accountability of real-world conversations also distort how we think people are?  Assholes maintain a cover of politeness.  Extremists avoid confrontation.  Rarely is expressed an interest in politics or cat photos.  We are most likely to meet people of the same social class and education level as us.

So I realize that this leaves me on shaky ground.  If we have no good method of determining "what people think" (and in fact the very concept is ill-defined), how can I know that Tumblr is any worse than other parts of the internet, or any worse than offline?  Maybe Tumblr represents what people really think, and the things we hear offline are distorted.

I don't really have knowledge that Tumblr is worse than other parts of the internet, but I suspect.  More to the point, sockpuppets are rampant on Tumblr.  It comes from a combination of things:

• Tumblr encourages and facilitates individuals to have multiple blogs.  Identities are not traceable between the blogs.
• Because comments are replaced with reblogging, there is no moderation, and no one who can detect sockpuppets.
• Blog discovery and viral sharing is so effective that new accounts can gain a lot of attention easily.

I don't track tags, I only read tumblrs that I specifically subscribe to, but I've still seen several obvious sockpuppets on Tumblr (usually new accounts that have one or two posts).  I can only imagine how many non-obvious sockpuppets there are that I've missed.

My contempt for sockpuppets is far greater than my contempt for trolls.  Sockpuppets know that they cannot win on arguments, and therefore intentionally resort to cognitive biases (ie we are swayed by the opinions of a crowd).  If we discover a sockpuppet, then we should take this as evidence against their position, in hopes of neutralizing the bias they have created.  Sockpuppets deserve to automatically lose, and be stricken from the record.

If I may speak more specifically about Tumblr culture, there are, for reasons unknown, a lot of people in minority groups.  And because of the aforementioned blog discovery and viral sharing, minority groups interact a lot with their majority counterparts (who may consist mostly of other minorities).  Many critics seem to think that Tumblr has a unique brand of social justice, but I think it's just that people in the majority groups were previously unaware of what people in minority groups have been talking about all along.  From the perspective of a long-time blog-reader, none of it seems genuinely new.

In any case, there is a bit of a "social justice" culture, as well as a hyper-awareness of that culture, and therefore a backlash counter-culture, and then a counter-counter-culture, ad infinitum.  This dynamic is the setting of most sockpuppeting and trolling on Tumblr.  Most typically, there are people (usually part of a minority group, but not part of the particular minority group under discussion) trying to get a rise out of those "PC nuts", and the "PC nuts" fall for it.

I have some familiarity with feminist blogging, and I know that many people would be miffed by what I'm saying.  I appear to be telling them to ignore the wrongness, as if ignoring has ever led to a change in the status quo.  (See example of someone opposing the expression "Don't feed the trolls".)  I largely agree with the points made here.  I do not necessarily advocate ignoring sockpuppets or potential sockpuppets.  I don't think that ignoring sockpuppets improves the situation, or that giving attention to sockpuppets necessarily makes the situation worse.  I do not think that just because their identities are false, that the negative feelings they create are also false.

Rather, I think we should devalue comments coming from new blogs.  And we should devalue comments whose strength comes not from substantive arguments, but from the mere fact that someone said it.  This is not just good practice against sockpuppets, but good practice in general.

(Also, we should escape from Tumblr but I'm not getting that wish any time soon.)

There's knowing and there's knowing

This was crossposted on The Asexual Agenda.

I have a lot of gay friends who are friends through my boyfriend.  Recently some of them heard that I was asexual, and they started quizzing my boyfriend when I wasn't around.  This is pretty nasty for reasons I'll get into later.  But what's odd is that I've known them for years and been out the entire time, and they only realize now?

Mind you, I don't come out to each and every one of my friends by sitting down with them to have a "talk".  Rather, I'm out on Facebook.  I say asexuality-related things a few times a year, and I have photos of myself at SF pride.  I'm carrying the X in "ASEXY".  How much more obvious can it get?

It's possible, and understandable, that some of my friends just don't pay attention to Facebook.  But I also think that people have to be paying very close attention, or the idea of asexuality just bounces off their head.  I say "I'm asexual." on Facebook, and people just carry on.  Then someone else says, "Did you hear, miller is asexual!"  Then suddenly they realize that it's a real thing, and it's important.  I wasn't just vaguebooking.

But in fact, I did the same thing before I was out to myself.  I learned about asexuality before really learning about asexuality.  I had asexuality explained to me years before I realized asexuality was a real possibility, but I had promptly forgotten it.

I had asexuality explained to me by T-rex:

See the full comic at Dinosaur Comics

I don't remember reading this comic but I know I read it.  Back in my freshman year of college I was really into Dinosaur Comics, and I read the entirety of the archives.  Which means I read this one as well.  But I must not have thought much of it.  It's just another one of T-rex's ideas (T-rex is enthusiastic about ideas).  Utahraptor himself corrects T-rex's attitude: "You're treating asexuality like an amusing trinket, rather than a real sexual orientation", but this still failed to penetrate into my head.

What it took was not merely a reference on a popular webcomic.  What it took was seeing a whole community of people discussing asexuality.

And for my friends, numerous references on Facebook weren't enough.  Only when it's part of the gossip does it seem significant.

Holding hands

My new favorite webcomic is O Human Star (occasionally NSFW).  It's about a man who dies and goes to the future, where he must confront his gender identity issues in cyborg form.  Classic!

Anyway, these few panels made me nostalgic.

sadface (from O Human Star)

I remember back in middle school when my girlfriend wanted to hold hands with me.  Why?? I did not understand the appeal.  That's just something you do to be socially identifiable as a couple, right?  It didn't make sense at all.

Much later when I dated a guy for the first time, I was surprised that I actually wanted to hold hands with him.  Weeeeird!  Anyway, he refused, possibly because he was closeted.  I didn't realize quite how oppressive the taboo against men holding hands was until then.

Nowadays, my boyfriend and I hold hands all the time and generally engage in a lot of PDA.  Straight people are usually too embarrassed to say anything, but our gay friends occasionally complain.  Ha, like they can stop us!

Asexuals construct things too

This was cross-posted on The Asexual Agenda

Previously, Calinlapin explained what a social construction is, and how many of the beliefs that asexuals fight are social constructions.  But I must admit that I am somewhat of a detractor from this idea.  To take a single example,

Everyone desires sex and has pleasure having it.

This is a social construction because it appears to be a natural consequence of our world, but it's really a belief that's contingent on our society and culture.  But--maybe the is the scientistic way of viewing it--isn't it easier to argue that the belief is simply false?  Let's look at it empirically.  Can we find anyone who does not desire sex or derive pleasure from sex?  Perhaps there are some reading this blog right now?

On the other hand, I also like to use social constructionism to understand ideas created within the asexual community.  Perhaps this is because as a gray-A, I am on the borders of many definitions, and I find it liberating to question those concepts, to realize that they are not inevitable.

Take sexual attraction, which is the keystone of the definition of asexuality.  Sexual attraction is typically conceptualized as being accompanied by sexual arousal, sexual fantasies, butterflies in the stomach, a desire to look at or touch the person, and probably some other experiences I'm unfamiliar with.  But as asexuals we understand that this conceptualization of sexual attraction is contingent on culture.  And as proof of this fact, in our own little asexual subculture, we separate out sexual attraction from sexual arousal from sexual fantasies, etc.

But do we realize that we're basically countering the social construction of sexual attraction with another construction of our own?  That the way we think of sexual attraction is contingent on our subculture, upon the history of our community?

Yes.  I think we do realize that.  But sometimes we don't act like it.

Of particular interest to me is the endless agonizing over what would count as asexual, and what wouldn't.  I did that too, once upon a time.  And it wasn't a bad thing; it helped me think over a lot of stuff.  But sometimes we are too slow to realize that one possible answer is, "There is no answer."  That is to say, there is no inevitable answer.  The answer could depend on whether you're in this culture or that culture, on whether you're in the asexual community of 2006 or the asexual community of 2012.

Note that I could be wrong about this!  If I say, "sexual attraction is a social construction", that is a statement that can be true or false.  Most likely, it's partly true and partly false.  Some things will change as asexual communities develop, grow, and split, and other things will stay the same.  If you want to know which parts are socially constructed, let's watch and find out!

 

I am a hopeless empiricist.

The game theory of profiling

Previously, I read a paper that mathematically modeled the search for a malfeasor using profiling techniques.  I concluded that the model does not apply to security against airplane hijackers (though it may apply to other security situations).  You know what, I could build a better model than that!  I'm a physicist, dammit!

This comic seemed appropriate.

So here's my model.  Suppose that there is a small minority of fliers who are "marked" as especially suspicious.  (In Harris vs Schneier, the marked group are Muslims, though Schneier points out that being Muslim usually isn't a visible characteristic, and you'd have to use some proxy, such as "Arab-looking".)  There is a fixed percentage of fliers that airport security can search, but if they like they can choose to search people in the marked group more often.

Security's adversaries are the terrorists.  They have a certain amount of recruitment resources, which they can use to recruit hijackers in the marked group, or outside the marked group.  However, if they recruit outside the marked group, it costs more resources, and thus they can recruit fewer people.

Security plays to minimize the number of successful attacks.  To do this, they must minimize the average number of hijackers not searched.  Terrorists play to maximize the number of successful attacks.  The question: How much should security focus on searching the marked group, and how much should the Terrorists focus on recruiting from the marked group?

Parameters in this model:

m = the ratio of the number of people in the marked group to the number of everyone else

λ = the percentage of fliers that security can search

c = the ratio of the cost of recruiting a hijacker from the marked group to the cost of recruiting elsewhere

Assumptions I will make:

m is very small (the marked group is a very small minority)

λ > m (security can search every single person in the marked minority if they want)

λ < 1/(1+m) (security cannot search every single person outside of the marked group)

c < 1 (It is cheaper to recruit hijackers in the marked minority)

The number of hijackers the terrorists can recruit is smaller than the number of people in the minority.

Lastly, I will ignore the fact that people come in discrete quantities.

The game:

Both airport security and terrorists have a choice to make.  And it's not one of those either/or choices, they have a whole sliding scale to choose from.  Let y be the position of the sliding scale for airport security, and let x be the position of the sliding scale for terrorists.

Legend text: "Percentage of minority searched"; "Percentage of other people searched"; "Hijackers recruited from minority"; "Hijackers recruited elsewhere".  n is the maximum number of hijackers that can be recruited, but this parameter does not figure into the solution.

x and y are each numbers between 0 and 1.  The greater x is, the more the terrorists focus on recruiting from the marked group.  The greater y is, the more airport security focuses on recruiting from the marked group.

The number of successful attacks is a function of x and y.  I will represent this function as the height in the following graph:

Terrorists control the x coordinate, and want to maximize the height.  Airport security controls the y coordinate, and wants to minimize the height.  Assuming both players are rational[1], and know each other to be rational, they will choose the single Nash equilibrium.  This is a saddle point, which I've marked in the above graph.

Results:

I could give you the coordinates of the solution[2], but this would be meaningless because x and y are just abstract quantities.  Here are some more meaningful quantities.

Click for larger

Yes, that means the terrorists should be equitable in their recruitment process.  Even if it is easier to recruit from the marked group, they should still make no effort to focus on the marked group.  This solution is exact[3].

The results for the airport security, on the other hand, are approximations only valid for small m.  Basically, security should search a percentage of marked people such that the terrorists get just as much bang for their buck regardless of where they recruit.

If I were to plug in "reasonable" numbers, I would say c = 3/4, and λ = 1/5.  With these numbers, airport security should search 2/5 of people in the marked group, and 1/5 of everyone else.

Applicability of this analysis:

This analysis is inapplicable, because it ignores the additional risk and cost associated with determining a profiling scheme, determining the parameters, and training security personnel to implement it.  There are probably other complications too.  Lastly, it assumes that airport security is rational. So maybe applications are a lost cause, but at least I got to do some math.

[1]This is "rational" in the game theory sense, which is frequently irrational in the colloquial sense.

[2]The exact coordinates are ( cm/(1+cm) , 1 - c(1-λ)(1+m)/(1+cm) ).

[3]That is to say, it does not use the assumption that m is very small. However, it does use the other assumptions.

The evil of theodicy

Earlier a commenter told me I should stop bashing religion. This left me wondering, where did they see me bashing religion?  I feel like I've mostly said neutral things about it lately.  I should do more religion bashing!

The problem of evil asks: How can there be a all-powerful and all-good god if there is evil in the world?  Obviously this only applies to religions with an all-powerful and all-good god, and I might as well say that I'm thinking of Christianity in particular.

I'm not sure I've ever talked about the problem of evil before.  I don't really like it, because there's no math involved.  And the argument is too sprawling, with a multitude of rebuttals.  In fact, we even have the word "theodicy", which means a defense against the problem of evil.

Most theodicies are not very compelling, but that's not what I want to talk about.  I want to talk about how theodicies, above and beyond being bad arguments, are also evil arguments.  That is, many theodicies involve defending evil, or denying the existence of certain kinds of evils.

The free will defense

The free will defense says that evil exists in the world because of human free will.  The obvious problem with the free will defense is that it ignores natural evils, like hurricanes and disease.  But let me tell you about some of the other kinds of evils it ignores.

There is the kind of evil which is caused by ignorance of the consequences of a free action.  To use a silly example, someone could open a door, not knowing someone was there to be smacked in the face.  Or, someone could buy a diamond, not knowing that the money is used to fund a terrible war.  Or if someone votes for X political party, not knowing that God truly endorses the opposing party (har har).  This is evil not caused by free will, but by ignorance, which is arguably a hindrance to true freedom.

There are various kinds of responses to the problem of natural evil.  One of them is that natural evil was released into the world by Adam and Eve's original sin.  Or, if you're Pat Robertson, natural evil was released into the world by modern actions such as homosexuality.  Or if you're Alvin Plantinga, natural evil was caused by the free will of nonhuman beings, like angels or spirits.  Presumably, the means of causation are magical (divine), but it's kind of funny that earthquakes and hurricanes mostly occur where you would expect them if they were caused by chaotic physical processes.

Now here's another problem being ignored: the sheer injustice and cruelty of this situation.  We deserve to be punished for the sin of a couple ancestors?  Or for the sins of other people within our society?  Or for the sins of some otherworldly beings we don't even know about?  The causal chain leading from sin to natural evil isn't very clear, but it's hard to imagine that God really doesn't have any control over it.  Is it interfering with the free will of gay people to change ocean temperatures and prevent a hurricane?  As far as I'm concerned, this theodicy only succeeds by conceding that God is not actually all-good.

The greater good

There are a variety of other theodicies which claim that natural evils are necessarily to achieve the greater good.  Suffering builds character!  (Except when it kills you, then it builds character among your relatives.)

For some reason, theodicy makes me think of classic Calvin and Hobbes

Or, if it's not character building, perhaps the lesser evil prevents some other greater evil.  Like the story about the guy who breaks his leg, and thus avoids a car accident.  God couldn't think of another way, that's not in his omnibenevolent nature.

I see this explanation as rather awful, and not just in the lacking-evidence sense.  It's also awful because now we're all supposed to see the silver lining in our suffering.  Our suffering is for a greater good!  Screw that.  It seems to me that evil comes about by completely natural means, irrespective of what ultimate good will come it.  People with terminal illnesses aren't all dying for the greater good, and it's awful to suggest that they are, or that this is how it should be.

Other theodicies off the top of my head include: "Good cannot exist without evil, just as black and white cannot exist without each other," and, "All wrongs are righted in the afterlife."  I've decided to cut this post short, so I leave it to the reader to decide if there is anything evil about these theodicies.  Are they denying some particular kind of evil?  Are they being callous to people in suffering?  Or perhaps they are not evil arguments at all, just uncompelling?

Science vs Acne

I have pretty bad back acne.  No, I will not show you photos.  This is not that kind of blog.

I don't really care about my acne.  I've shown it scientifically!  In the past when I've tried acne medication, my conclusion was that I don't have the motivation to apply the medication on a regular basis, and that medication applied on an irregular basis is ineffective.

But I have new motivation.  I have what I'm worried is another abscess.  After how painful it was last time, I'm taking someone's suggestion that I apply hot packs to kill the bacteria before it grows big.  As long as I'm boiling this water, I might as well kill some acne!

Of course, I'm not actually going to do any science.  I am participating in what has been called the "coffeeshop fallacy" (via The Thinker).  I like the idea of doing science, but I'm not actually willing to put in the effort.  I'm a PhD student, and I have real science to occupy my time!  So what I'm actually going to do here is an affectionate parody of science, whatever amuses me.

The hot pack idea comes from Brian Dunning.  He cites a study which says you can treat acne by applying 120 farenheit for three minutes twice a day.  There's no way I will use such stringent protocols.  Brian suggested using a laptop power adapter, but I'm going to use a rag with a bit of boiling water poured on it.  I can use the extra boiling water for tea!

The other day I had some Yogi tea called "skin detox".  On the label, it said:

Goodness should become human nature because it is real nature

This so that I can credit the tea later if I get rid of the acne.

I'm taking another idea from XKCD:



On one side of my back, I'll apply the hot pack.  On the other side, I may just try some acne medication.  Then I will ask my boyfriend to say which side looks better, without telling him which is which.  Actually, I will probably use really shoddy blinding, and he'll find out which side is which.  But he will appreciate the excuse for me to be topless.

And my excuse for writing about the experiment before it's done is to avoid reporting bias.  As you know, scientists are less likely to report negative results than positive ones, which can lead to systematic errors.  Therefore, if I never write about this again, you may assume that the results were negative, or that I lost all motivation.

Sex-negativity and asexuality

When I talk about reactions to asexuality, I mostly discuss reactions from sex-positive and non-religious people.  This emphasis is decided by what's most relevant to me in my own life.  My social circles mainly consist of queers, physicists, and skeptics, none of which are particularly sex-negative or religious.

But a fuller understanding demands that I also speak of the reactions from sex-negative and religious people.*  Do they love asexuals?  Do they think asexuals are aberrations to be discouraged?  Do they shrug their shoulders and move on?  Do they shrug their shoulders and stab asexuals in the back when it comes to substantive issues?  If only I had the relevant experience to say!

*In American culture, religion tends to be associated with sex-negativity, but of course this isn't true in general.  All my comments have limited applicability.

Nonetheless, I will blather on as if I really did know what I was talking about.  I will give two examples.  These are not representative examples, but the worst examples I have ever seen on the internet.  (I wouldn't be surprised if the only hits these websites get anymore are from angry asexuals.)  These examples do not tell you what will go wrong, but what could go wrong.

Here's the first one:

Question: What do you call a person who is asexual? Answer: Not a person. Asexual people do not exist. Sexuality is a gift from God and thus a fundamental part of our human identity. Those who repress their sexuality are not living as God created them to be: fully alive and well. As such, they're most likely unhappy.
--"Eight Myths about Religious Life", on the Catholic Religious Vocation Network

The authors of this article are responding to myths about people in religious orders.  One of those myths is that these people are asexual.  Of course, the authors don't know that there is actually a group of people who identify as asexual, they just see "asexual" as an insult.  Therefore, this is not an intentional attack on asexuals.  It's unintentional.  It's still an attack though.  (It's not as if good intentions magically reverse reality.)

You can see in there several myths about asexuality right off the bat.  "Asexual" is an insult, the ultimate way to dehumanize someone.  Asexuals must be repressing themselves.  They must be unhappy.  And you can see that these myths spring directly from their view of sexuality as a gift from God.

It's definitely possible to reconcile asexuality with the view of God-given sexuality.  But if you believed in God-given sexuality, asexuality is certainly not what you'd initially expect!  You wouldn't have guessed that God gave one of his greatest gifts to only some people.  You wouldn't have guessed that these people can come to value different things and be just as happy.

Sometimes atheists get asked, disingenuously, how they can believe in love when it's just a bunch of bouncing chemicals.  But I actually think this is one of the greatest things about the naturalistic worldview.  Love is just a chemical pattern, which doesn't mean it can't be great.  But its greatness is not a fundamental fact of reality, it is derivative, contingent.  So if you have some people who don't fall in love, or other people who don't care for sex, that can be great for them too.

The other example is from Celibrate, a website that "provide[s] support, encouragement, advice, information and acceptance for everyone living without sex".  By itself that's fine enough.  Since asexuality is one reason people might be celibate, they have a nice section on asexuality.  And then there's this paragraph at the end:

Misleading websites have appeared that suggest asexuality has much in common with homosexuality, some going so far as to say that one can be homo-asexual. However, a person identifying as such is more likely to be a homosexual practicing celibacy. Of course, asexuals often have an aesthetic attraction to either one sex or the other, but this is not the same as a sexual attraction. Generally speaking, in terms of sex drive and desire, the homosexual and the asexual could not be further apart.
--From Celibrate: Celebrating Celibacy

This reminds me of a dream I had.*  I was watching TV (who does that anymore?) and there was a newsperson giving a public service announcement, something about cigarettes and cancer.  And then the newsperson inexplicably stops as if something more important just came up.  He turns his head, looks at me--not any else--and says, "Fuck you."

*This is fictional.

Yeah, so the quote is pretty homophobic.  It seems out of place in an introduction to asexuality.  No parallel comments are implied about hetero-asexuals.  And you can tell that they're using the stupid version of the sexual spectrum.  (I'm pretty sure I stole this idea from Kaz at some point.)

asexual -------------- straight -------------- gay
robots? ----------- normal folks ----------- OMG buttsex

And that's why their response to asexual plus gay is "Does Not Compute".

Homophobia really is a serious barrier to accepting asexuality.  I can't talk to people about asexuality when they don't even accept the more basic concept of homosexuality.  Like, if someone still thinks being gay is a choice, or that homosexuality is wrong because men and women are complementary, or that gay stereotypes are accurate, what am I supposed to say to that?  How am I supposed to talk about attraction vs behavior vs identity in any sophisticated way?  How am I supposed to talk about societal expectations, gender roles, or asexual stereotypes?

And if they don't like the significant fraction of asexuals who are gay/lesbian, who knows what other subgroups they'd toss out.  Bi asexuals.  Asexuals with gender issues.  Asexuals who talk about sex, or make sex jokes.  Asexuals with a sexual history, or present sexual activity.  Asexuals who look at porn.  Kinky asexuals.  These groups are not just necessary for the people within them, but also for the community's spirit of self-exploration.  It's hard to explore when large swaths are declared off-limits for no good reason.

The worst part about it is that it makes me paranoid.  Even if a sex-negative person gives a positive or neutral response to asexuality, I tend to distrust them.  Do they yet know what the asexual community is like?  And when they find out, will they still be friendly?

Finally, I'd like to say that sex-positive people have got it all wrong about sex-negative people.  Sex-positive people are like:

T-Rex is so lovable

But so-called sex-negative people can be sort of the same way.  Remember, "sex-negative" is only a term given them by their opponents.  Sometimes, sex-negativity is really all about how unquestionably great sex is, as long as you are having sex the right way at the right time.

And other times, sex-negative people are not so bad.  Darn it, why people gotta be so varied?  They're preventing me from overgeneralizing.

On asexual relationships

Did you know? XKCD once had a comic about asexuality.

Okay, not really.  But it's relevant.  As most sexual people know, sexual relationships create all sorts of drama.  So if you're asexual, you get to avoid all that, right?  No such luck.

Asexual relationships fall into two categories: the conventional and unconventional.

Conventional relationships include romantic relationships, friendships, family relationships, coworker relationships, and so forth.  Some asexuals--I call them "classic" aromantic asexuals--have entirely conventional relationships, except for romantic relationships, which they avoid entirely.  There are other asexuals who have entirely conventional relationships including sexual romantic relationships.  They may do this as a compromise with a partner, or because they're only borderline asexual, or because they just want to do it, or because they don't know they're asexual, or any other number of reasons.

Unconventional relationships fit in none of the above categories, and may come with entirely different social rules.  In theory, an unconventional relationship can be anything at all.  In practice, only a small range of unconventional relationships actually get discussed.  The simplest is the nonsexual romantic relationship, which is pursued by "classic" romantic asexuals.  It's basically a conventional romantic relationship only without sex.*  The man on the street asks, "But isn't romance just friendship plus sex?" It would seem that classic romantic asexuals are empirical evidence to the contrary!

*This might not even be considered unconventional.

But the man on the street may be right about some people.  Lots of asexuals--let's call them WTFromantics--really do feel confused about the difference between friendship and romance.  Well, not confused exactly.  It's more like, they want friends with more commitment and cuddles, or they want romantic partners with more independence and space.  They want a relationship which fits neither the friendship nor relationship category.  They want an unconventional relationship.

Some non-asexuals tell me that these ideas resonate with them too.  Feel free to borrow them.

I come from the perspective of forming only conventional relationships, including romantic relationships.  I don't feel comfortable with unconventional relationships, just as some WTFromantics don't feel comfortable with conventional relationships.  But I have it easier, because I already have this set of rules made out for me, and WTFromantics have to make it up as they go along.  I'm betting this results in drama drama drama, as if conventional relationships didn't already have enough drama.

Discussion of unconventional relationships is very common in asexual communities.  It's kind of frustrating for me, because I feel like an outsider to this discussion.  But why should I be frustrated at a discussion that helps other people?  So I suck it up.

But it still frustrates me when asexuals imply that we should all want unconventional relationships.  It's a pretty easy mistake to make.  First you're complaining about people who think there's no middle ground between romance and friendship.  Next you're complaining about people who refuse to be in the middle ground.  I feel this is akin to a bisexual complaining that not everyone is bisexual.  Or more aptly, a polyamorous person complaining that some people are monogamous, or a monogamous person complaining that some people are polyamorous.  It sucks, I know, and you want to complain.  But I don't feel comfortable with complaining about other people's sexualities when that's just a part of who they are.

I should provide a specific example for my asexual readers so they know what I'm talking about.  Two words: "relationship hierarchy".  The relationship hierarchy is the idea that romantic relationships are somehow "more" than friendships.  This is decidedly untrue for aromantics, and for some other asexuals.  So asexuals complain about it a lot.  The problem begins when they complain about other people's relationships.  Here's one example:

I believe with absolute conviction that there are far more human beings on this earth who have a capacity to experience romantic and platonic emotions on a spectrum, rather than in two regimented boxes that never intersect.

See also: "Everyone is really bisexual."

They try to explain that a romantic partner you aren’t fucking is different from a friend because your romantic partner is The Most Important Person in your life and The Only One that you have formal expectations of, want to live with, feel possessive of, spend all your time thinking about, want to be with all the time, etc. And this annoys me because I’m trying to GET AWAY from the Relationship Hierarchy, I think the world would greatly benefit if most people got away from it too...

It's hard not to feel slighted by this characterization (especially when it got wide approval in the asexual tumblr community).  I do feel like my romantic partner is more important than any of my platonic relationships.  This is because I prefer wide circles of relatively distant friends.  In fact, this is what I like about friendships, that they are low commitment.  My boyfriend is different; he prefers a small group of much closer friends.  Diversity is pretty fascinating that way.

Suddenly, I feel bad that this post started out as an exposition to the wonders of asexual relationships, and turned into a rant on the ugly side of asexual discourse.

What is temperature?

In an earlier post, I wanted to explain temperature, but I think this deserves its own post.  Temperature is complicated.  It's clearly defined at the beginning of any class on thermodynamics or statistical mechanics, but I think that this definition will leave a popular audience cold (no pun intended).

Even if you understand everything about this equation (T is temperature, S is entropy, and E is energy), you would be hard-pressed to find the connection between this definition and our perceptions of "hot" and "cold".

So I'm going to explain it in the other direction, starting with hot and cold, and then working our way back to this definition.

Building a definition of temperature

I think we all intuitively understand that if we put a hot object and a cold object together, the hot object gets cooler and cool object gets hotter.  This represents an exchange of energy between the two objects.  The energy flows from the hotter object to the cooler object.  Eventually, the two objects will reach the same temperature.

But this is not the same as saying that the two objects reach the same energy.  If hot steam comes out of a teapot, the steam clearly doesn't have as much energy as the entire earth's atmosphere, yet energy will still flow from the steam to the atmosphere as the steam cools down.  It might seem like you could correct for this by considering the density of energy rather than the total energy, but this approach will also ultimately fail.

But we can definitely say one thing about temperature.  The higher the temperature of an object, the more "willing" it is to give up its energy.  The lower the temperature, the more "willing" it is to accept energy.

I want to point out a characteristic of this process that may not seem strange at first, but is.  The process of energy flowing from hot objects to cold objects cannot be reversed.  If we recorded the process, and played the recording backwards, it wouldn't make any sense.  The hot object would get hotter, and the cool object would get cooler.

This is strange because pretty much every law of physics works the same way forwards in time and backwards in time.  But there's one notable exception, the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  The Second Law states that entropy increases with time (and therefore decreases if you play time backwards).  So if a process occurs forwards, but not backwards, that means it must involve an increase entropy.  We'll get to the precise meaning of "entropy" later, but for now you just need to know it increases over time.

The exchange of energy between hot and cold objects represents a redistribution of energy to where it will contribute the most entropy.  In a cold object, a little energy goes a long way to increasing the entropy.  In a hot object, it takes a lot of energy to increase the entropy just a bit.  So in order to maximize entropy, it makes sense move energy from the hotter object to the cooler object.

Typically, the dependence of entropy on energy looks something like the blue curve below.  Note that the more energy you have, the less quickly entropy increases.  This produces a temperature which increases with energy (in purple).

However, there's no logical contradiction in having a system where the temperature decreases as the energy increases.  Nor is there logical contradiction in having a negative temperature.  But it just doesn't happen in stable systems.

What is Entropy?

Let's talk briefly about entropy (but not too long).  Entropy is usually described as a measure of disorder.  But a more precisely, entropy is a measure of how many different ways a system can be, and yet still look the same from the big picture.

For example, from the big picture, a broken egg is a broken egg.  But there are a lot of ways an egg can be broken, a lot of ways the cracks can go, and a lot of ways the shell can be scattered around.  On the other hand, there is basically one way for an egg to be intact.  So we could say that a broken egg has higher entropy than an intact egg.

But the egg is just a toy example.  Here's a more realistic one: I can look at a gas from the big picture and measure its temperature and volume and pressure.  But I can't see the motion of every individual particle.  There are a lot of different ways the particles could be moving around, and yet they'd still look the same to me.  So we can say that the gas has entropy.

Usually, the more energy a system has, the more ways there are to allocate that energy among all the little particles.  And therefore it has more entropy.

The second law of thermodynamics is based on the idea that every possible state of a system is more or less equally likely.  Therefore, from the big picture, high entropy states are more likely.

The Boltzmann Factor

Let's look at an individual particle in a gas.  The more energy this particle has, the less is left over for the rest of the gas.  The less energy the gas has, the less entropy it has.  More precisely, if you divide the cost in energy by the temperature, then you will find the cost in entropy.  The more entropy it costs, the less likely it is to occur.

But if a gas has a very high temperature, then it doesn't cost much entropy for our particle to be energetic.  So the higher the temperature, the more likely it is for a particle to have high energies.

This relationship is described in Boltzmann's Factor:

p is the probability that a single particle is in a state with energy E.  T is the temperature.  k is just a constant to make the units right.  The equation says that p exponentially decreases as E/kT.

So another way to understand temperature is as a measure of the spread in energy.  The higher the temperature, the greater the variance in energy held by each particle.  The lower the temperature, the more the particles are confined to low energies.

So now you can see that temperature is closely associated with the random energy held by individual particles in a system.  But temperature is not the same as energy.

Michio Kaku and Deepak Chopra

Some people have asked me what I think about Michio Kaku, the string theorist who popularizes physics and futurism.  His last book, Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration Into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel, discusses three classes of "impossible" technologies.  Class I impossibilities may become possible within a century or two.  Class II impossibilities may become possible in thousands or millions of years.  Class III impossibilities will never become possible unless there is some fundamental shift in our understanding of physics.

I think Michio Kaku and I have very different philosophies about popularizing science.  Kaku likes to reach for the amazing and sensational potentials of the world.  I like to bring things down to earth, grounding them in simple concepts.  Or something like that.  Clearly there are differences even if I cannot articulate them.

But that doesn't mean we have to clash!  I would probably agree with Michio Kaku on most of his futurist predictions, at least when properly translated.  Allow XKCD to do the translating.

Michio Kaku says that class I impossibilities may come in a century or so.  The translation is "It has not been conclusively proven impossible."  I totally agree!  See, no clashing.

But recently, Uncertain Principles pointed out an interview of Michio Kaku by Deepak Chopra.  If there is a time to clash, now is it.  Let me pull out a bunch of the worst quotes.

DC [Deepak Chopra]: What the basis for your book is, that if it does not violate the laws of mathematics or physics then it is in the realm of possibility, really?
MK [Michio Kaku]: That's right. If it's not forbidden by the laws of physics, it's mandatory.

This is an example of type 2 technobabble.  It's true that there is a principle in physics that states, "If it's not forbidden, then it's mandatory," but this is really not the right context for it.  The correct context is particle physics, because all possible particle interactions will mathematically contribute to the result.  Of course, some interactions contribute more than others, and most interactions are just impossible.  But don't let that get you down on life, because this only relates to the context of particle physics.

MK: Right. Think about this: if you were to push a button and the force field has knowledge of how to construct walls and floors and sidewalks, with a push of a button you could create an entire city.

If I had an infinite lever and an immovable place to stand on, then we could move the world around.  It's all a matter of getting the technical details sorted out. (That's a Terry Pratchett reference btw.)

DC: Is our conversation affecting something in another galaxy right now?
MK: In principle. What we're talking about right is affecting another galaxy far, far beyond the Milky Way Galaxy. Now when the Big Bang took place we think that most of the matter probably was vibrating in unison.

I guess if we take a strict Many Worlds Interpretation, I suppose it is true "in principle" that things here are correlated with things in other galaxies.  But this is very misleading.  Really, it will be a mix of correlations, anti-correlations, and everything in between, which is to say that on average there is no correlation at all.  This is the very important principle of quantum decoherence.

MK: We actually demonstrated it right on TV cameras. We went to the University of Maryland outside Baltimore and we showed an atom being teleported right across the room. You can actually see two chambers, an atom in one being zapped across the room.

Chad explained why this is misleading over at Uncertain Principles.  One major error is that there is already an atom in each chamber.  Quantum teleportation only transfers a quantum state from one atom to another, not the atoms themselves.  Also, the atoms were very carefully prepared by experimenters, not by the Big Bang.

This post is longer than I expected, so I should insert another visual.

DC: Every cell is instantly correlated with every cell. A human body can think thoughts, play a piano, kill germs, remove toxins, make a baby all at once.
...
To my mind the human body is an example or for that matter a leaf for any biological, of quantum entanglement. Everything is correlated with everything instantly. What would you say to that?

MK: Yes, things are entangled so in some sense messages can travel faster than light instantaneously, however the messages that go faster than light are random messages. You can't send Morse code or information through these things and sometimes we de-cohere from matter so that we can no longer communicate with other forms of matter.

This time, it's Deepak Chopra who is saying something deeply silly, and Kaku just lets most of it go.

Chopra is proposing that correlations between different parts of our body is caused by quantum entanglement.  I'm no expert, but I thought it was caused by electrical signals moving along neurons.  It certainly is not instant, it's just instant for all practical purposes.  It is not faster than light, so no quantum entanglement is necessary.  And as Kaku points out, if it were faster than light, then only random messages would be communicated.

DC: But let's come back to a biological system. That's not random, that's very coherent, you know this biological system or a system like say when you have morphogenesis and differentiation, when a cell divides, keeps dividing so that you know in first year applications it has become the hundred trillion cells which is more than all the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. That requires some kind of non-local correlation to my mind, theoretically.
MK: Well these non-local correlations are going to be extremely important in the next few decades coming from the computer realm of things.

Auuggh, no!  Michio Kaku just conceded that the biological correlations are non-local (ie faster than light).  They aren't!  That's why the messages can be non-random, as Chopra observes.

DC: To me a rose is rainbows and sunshine, earth, water, and wind, air, and the infinite void and the Big Bang all rolled into one.
MK: Mmm hmm. And Einstein was wrong in this one. We measured this every day in the laboratory. That electrons can dance in between multiple states and then the question is why can't I dance between multiple states?

If someone says, "a rose is rainbows and sunshine," the correct answer is "No it isn't," no matter what kind of dance the electrons are doing.

Michio Kaku also said something very silly about how quantum mechanics might prove the existence of an omniscient being, but I'll leave that one for another post.  (ETA: It is done)

I agree with Chad, someone ought to be ashamed for this interview.

Talk Like a Physicist: The Hella edition

Today is March 14th, Pi Day.  It's also Talk Like a Physicist Day, which is something the internets made up so they can geek out a bit.

I think I must talk like a physicist all the time.  My casual conversation is peppered with things like "within an order of magnitude" and "negligible".  I'm not sure this is a behavior I should encourage, since my non-physics friends probably have no clue what I'm saying.

But just as physics terms have affected my slang, could slang affect the language of physics?  Some people on the internets hope so!  Austin Sendek, from UC Davis, started a Facebook petition to make "hella" a new SI prefix.

I'm sure you're all familiar with at least a few of the SI prefixes.  A kilometer, for instance, is 10³ meters.  A centimeter is 10-2, or 1/100th of a meter.  There are a bunch of other SI prefixes, listed below.

10^-1: deci- (d)
10^-2: centi- (c)
10^-3: milli- (m)
10^-6: micro- (μ)
10^-9: nano- (n)
10^-12: pico- (p)
10^-15: femto- (f)
10^-18: atto- (a)
10^-21: zepto- (z)
10^-24: yocto- (y)

10¹: deca- (da)
10²: hecto- (h)
10³: kilo- (k)
10⁶: mega- (M)
10⁹: giga- (G)
10¹²: tera- (T)
10¹⁵: peta- (P)
10¹⁸: exa- (E)
10²¹: zetta- (Z)
10²⁴: yotta- (Y)

But to be honest, I had to look most of these up.  If you start talking about zeptoseconds or petagrams, even physicists will give you strange looks. For most practical purposes, we never go beyond nano- or giga-.  If you want to go further, you use scientific notation, or you find new units.  For instance, one lightyear is about 10 petameters, but guess which unit is used more often.

But don't let that stop you from memorizing all the prefixes!




The goal of the "hella" petition is to make hella- the prefix for 10²⁷.  For instance, the earth is about 6 x 10²⁷ grams, or about 6 hellagrams.  Isn't that hella cool?  It's also probably ultimately pointless, much like Pi Day and Talk Like a Physicist Day.  But don't tell the internets I said that.

For the benefit of non-California residents, I should explain that "hella" is slang meaning "very".  Example usage: "Physics is hella fun!"  The slang is primarily used in NorCal (north California).  As for people in SoCal, they mostly know "hella" as that annoying slang that NorCal people use.  They also mostly know NorCal folks as those people who use that annoying slang "hella".

I'm a SoCal person myself, but I don't mind "hella".  This is probably because I plan to betray SoCal and move to NorCal sometime in the future.  There really is no other explanation.

The quantum mystic's paradox

As explained in a previous post, quantum mechanics allows for particles to be entangled. Basically, that means that the quantum state of two particles must be described together; they cannot be described separately.

A concrete example: Two electrons, which we'll name A and B, are emitted from a source in opposite directions. We can use a magnet to measure whether each electron is spin up or spin down. After repeating this experiment many times, we determine that 50% of the time, A is spin up and B is spin down. The other 50% of the time, A is spin down and B is spin up. This is because, before any measurements are made, A and B are in a mixed state of 50% (A up and B down) + 50% (A down and B up). They are entangled.

This basic idea of entangled particles led Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen to formulate the EPR paradox in 1935, which argues that quantum mechanics cannot be a complete theory. Imagine that A and B are entangled as above, and sent to opposite sides of the galaxy. Then I measure the spin of A. Before my measurement, the spin of B was undetermined, in a quantum mixed state. After my measurement, the spin of B is known, even though I never touched it, never even got close to it.

The problem is that it seems the state of B is affected instantly even though it is a hundred thousand lightyears away. Was there some sort of signal sent from A to B faster than the speed of light? If there were such a faster than light signal, this would not merely be strange and counterintuitive, but also paradoxical. According to Relativity Theory, if something travels faster than light, then there exists a reference frame in which it is traveling backwards in time. So now we have a signal traveling backwards in time, violating causality. What's to stop us from sending a message back in time to tell our past selves not to send the message?

The resolution: if there is indeed a signal traveling faster than light, this signal could not possibly transmit any information. If you can't transmit information, you can't send a message to your past self, and you can't violate causality.

Let's say I wanted to send a faster-than-light message across the galaxy. A message is basically composed of zeroes and ones. So let's try to send a short message across the galaxy, a single "1". When I measure A, I have a 50% chance to get spin up and 50% chance to get spin down. From this information, I can know the state of B. But I don't choose the state of A or B. So how can I choose to send a "1" rather than a "0"? I can't send any messages this way. The only thing I can send is random noise, which is exactly what my colleague across the galaxy would have gotten even if I had made no measurements at all.

Of course, I am greatly simplifying the EPR paradox and its resolution. This is all just to say that quantum mechanics escapes paradox by the skin of its teeth. Its position is delicate. And most forms of quantum mysticism just trample all over it.

More specifically, it's said in quantum mysticism that quantum mechanics is non-deterministic, and that we affect outcomes by observing them. Therefore, as the argument goes, observers can choose their own reality. And that's why thinking positively causes good things to come your way, and thinking negatively causes bad things to happen to you. It's not because positive thoughts lead to positive actions. It's quantum mechanics. (Implication: the positive actions themselves are unnecessary.)

From a common sense perspective, the quantum mystic's argument is just riddled with flaws. But as if that weren't enough, there is another flaw from a physics perspective: the EPR paradox returns! If I could in fact choose the outcome of a measurement, then I could use this quantum psychic ability to send coherent messages faster than light. All I have to do is choose to observe electron A as being spin down, and electron B is guaranteed to be spin up. I've just sent a single "1" across the galaxy instantaneously. Repeat the experiment many times, and I could send a bunch of zeroes and ones backwards in time.

It turns out that quantum mysticism doesn't just violate common sense, it violates causality too. So now it's just that much more of an extraordinary claim, and requires just that much more extraordinary evidence.

Mind you, I wouldn't recommend actually using this argument against quantum mysticism, since the target audience probably doesn't understand a word of it. It's all in good skeptical fun to think about it.

An inappropriate time to bring up this argument

Caveman Science Fiction

I love this comic from Dresden Codak. See the rest of Caveman Science Fiction.

It's a wonderful demonstration of the argument from fiction: If it's true in fiction, it must be true in real life too. The argument from fiction isn't just fallacious when applied to facts, but also when applied to moral lessons.

Knights and knaves

This kind of puzzle makes use of knights and knaves. A knight is a person who always tells the truth. A knave is a person who always lies. This sort of puzzle was invented, or at least popularized by Raymond Smullyan. They are fun times.

Classic #1:

You are trying to reach the legendary Knight's Village, where everyone is a knight. But you've reached a fork in the road, and you know that if you take a wrong turn, you will instead end up at the Knave's Village, where everyone is a knave. The fork is unmarked, but you see a villager, and resolve to ask him for directions. What single question should you ask him to get to the Knight's Village?

Classic #2:

You are in a labyrinth, and have reached a fork. One of the paths lead out, and the other will certainly lead to your doom (it's that kind of labyrinth). Two guards stand nearby, identical twin sisters. You have heard of these guards, and know that one is a knight, while the other is a knave. What single question can you ask the guards to get out of the labyrinth?

Comic comes from xkcd. Phrasings of the classics are mine. Some of my readers have already seen the classics, so I also wrote a bonus problem just for you.

Bonus problem:

Twenty-five knights and knaves sit around a round table. They all know each other well, but I don't know any of them. But I know that there's at least one knight at the table. I ask them all to point to the next knight on their left. Each one of them points to another person at the table. To my disappointment, even after carefully considering their answers, there is not a single person at the table who is certainly a knight, or certainly a knave. However, I now know how many knights are at the table in total!

How many knights are at the table?

As usual, solutions are posted. Hesitating to look is highly encouraged.

Talk like a physicist

Today is March 14. It's best known as Pi day, because the date 3.14 is equal to the decimal expansion of pi to the hundredth's digit. Lesser known is that it is also Albert Einstein's birthday. And even more obscurely, it is Talk Like a Physicist Day, an occasion that probably only physics bloggers are aware of...

Therefore, I think now is a good time to muse about those crazy physicists and their crazy naming conventions. Especially particle physicists. This SMBC comic is pretty accurate...

[Pro Tip: Hovering your mouse over that red circle on the SMBC website gives you extra funny]

Sadly, I must inform you that there is no such thing as a "splork" in particle physics... yet. However, I assure you that squarks are a serious possibility.

Let's break it down. These are all honest-to-goodness particle physics names!

• There are basically two types of particles: Fermions and Bosons. Fermions are "matter-building" particles, while Bosons are associated with forces.
  
• Bosons consist of photons, gravitons, gluons, and the W and Z bosons, which are associated with the electromagnetic, gravitational, strong, and weak forces respectively.
  
• The Fermions consist of Leptons, and Quarks.
• There are six flavors of leptons: electron, muon, tau and three associated neutrinos. Yes, "flavor" is a technical term.
  
• There are six flavors of quarks: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom
• I'm told that the top and bottom are sometimes called truth and beauty. Ironic, considering how elusive these particles are.
  
• Each quark has an associated quantum number. There's upness, downness, charmness, strangeness, and bottomness. Usually, no one cares about the top's quantum number, but I've concluded that it should be called "truthiness".
• The quarks always come in groups called hadrons. A quark-anti-quark pair is a meson, and a three-quark group is a baryon. Protons and neutrons are two kinds of baryons.
  
• Every fermion has an associated anti-particle. Not only do you have ups, downs, and electrons, but you also have anti-ups, anti-downs, and positrons, and so forth.
  
• You also got theoretical particles which have not yet been observed.
• The Higgs boson!
• Tachyons! They travel faster than light, and can go backwards in time.
• Super-symmetric particles! According to supersymmetry theory (abbreviated SUSY), every fermion should have a supersymmetric bosonic partner, and every boson should have a supersymmetric fermionic partner.
• The naming convention for supersymmetric partners of fermions is usually to add an "s" at the front of the name. So you got squarks and sleptons. Sleptons include the selectron, smuon, stau, and sneutrino. Squarks include sup, sdown, scharm, sstrange, stop, and sbottom.
• The naming convention for supersymmetric partners of bosons is usually to add an "ino" at the end, pronounced "ee-know". So we got photinos, gluinos, gravitinos, higgsinos, winos and zinos.
• Some mixture of photino, zino, and higgsino gives you the neutralino, which is the leading WIMP candidate for dark matter.

I'd say "I can't make this stuff up", but I think the problem is precisely that it seems I can make this stuff up.

Anyways, I think it's great that we have these names which are accessible and humorous. And perhaps the names give you a small window into how physicists view physics. We don't need some really arcane terminology, because the basic concepts which we describe are really not that arcane.

Happy MLK and inauguration day

Having a blog makes me feel obligated sometimes to comment about current events. I sort of prefer to say things that are neither here nor there, but I suppose that reality is worth paying attention to.

So... I think I'd like to echo the sentiment from this comic: "America is okay I guess sometimes". That is a message that I could maybe get behind, if it doesn't require any commitment.

Happy MLK day, and then tomorrow, happy Inauguration Day. Also try to be happy the day after that, but don't force it.