Some things I've learned about running

1) You don't like doing it? Nobody likes doing it. Just shut up and go.

2) You don't have 30 minutes you can spare? I don't believe you.

3) You really don't have 30 minutes? The President finds time to exercise. So can you.

4) If you get out there 3-4 times in one week, it actually starts sucking less, and after a couple weeks, your body actually starts craving it.

5) Just run until you can't run anymore. You don't have to kill yourself over it, just go. Every time you go you're doing yourself a favor, and next time you'll be able to go further.

6) If you let more than three days pass between runs, you'll regress. See rule #1.

7) Unless you really enjoy running, which I don't, you don't need to run more than about 3 miles at a time to be fit. If you still have some time after that, you should move on to other things, like core strengthening, flexibilty, balance, and power (that's the actual order of my priorities).

Ceviche

Ceviche is one of those dishes that I could never have enjoyed as a Missourian (let alone as a West Virginian) twenty years ago. It is only because of our modern food supply chain that I can purchase fresh cod and fresh octopus at Whole Foods in Brentwood, along with a bag of limes, oranges, lemons, cilantro... It really is breathtaking to think of all the amazing foods we have access to these days.

Here is a story that could only happen in our time. Strolling through Whole Foods yesterday, I thought to myself hey, I want to make some ceviche. So out comes my smart phone and, after a 30-minute discussion about work with a colleague who happened to be wandering through the same place and time, I finally googled "ceviche". Within seconds I was reading a recipe for classic Peruvian ceviche.

I bought 1 lb of fresh cod (of which I actually only used about 3/4), and 1/2 lb of fresh octopus, which I had the fishmonger at Whole Foods clean for me (which was great that she offered, since I have no idea how to clean an octopus). In place of the rocoto chili, I used three large sliced Bird's eye (Thai) chilis. In retrospect, I should've used twice as many. The heat didn't come through very prominently.

Because the limes were actually a little dry, it took me the entire bag of medium-sized organic limes to squeeze out just 3/4s of a cup of juice. So to keep the ratios consistent, I only put in 3 oz of orange juice and 3 oz of lemon juice.

The thinly sliced onion is actually a very important aspect of this recipe, because it provides a crunchiness to the final dish that would otherwise be just a lot of soft, pickled fish.

I let my fish "cook" (technically "denature") in the marinade for nearly 3 hours, which is the maximum amount of time recommended. I served it on some slightly toasted french bread with thin slices of avocado.

Now here is the real ULTIMATE kicker, which I know absolutely must be a prerequisite in Peru, because it is so perfect... I had remembered seeing on an Anthony Bourdain episode that the marinade itself, called the Leche de Tigre (the tiger's milk), is considered the ultimate hangover helper. Plus, I mean just consider what it is. It's just begging to be consumed. I mixed 2 oz of the leche de tigre with 2 oz of Don Cesar Pisco Puro, which is an excellent Peruvian unaged brandy (pisco), over ice, flavored with a bit of cilantro, shaken, strained... YUM! I had to have two.

Clearly the cocktail is not shown above, where I actually ate (a second round, next day) on Crispini crackers with a modest dressing of Sriracha. Coconut water does go well with the dish.

The only changes I would've made to this recipe are perhaps a bit more salt and twice as much heat.

God's Reasons

Why would God create man and then give him free will and say Worship me or Die! If you tell me that he has reasons, then that implies that we could deduce his reasons through logic. But the conclusions are not attractive.

"Ignorance is not bliss. It is unconsciousness and slavery; only intelligence can make us sharers in the shaping of our fates." - Will Durant

Green Programming and Fundies

A few years back I started writing a blog entry about Green Programming, in which I attempted to define a philosophical position that views inefficient code as a moral failure. As a programmer, you are responsible for ensuring that your software runs efficiently, just as you are responsible for recycling your recyclables and conserving water.

It makes me remember that morals are sourced from a given worldview, and what may be considered moral by one person, like recycling, may be considered frivolous by another. For instance I know that some people view the world as a place of temporary existence on the way to an afterlife where everything on the planet is created and declared by their god to be at their disposal with no need to worry about exhaustion. Of course this is despicable to someone who doesn't believe in their god and sees them leaving their trash all over the place and making the world a progressively dirtier and sicker place to live, where ultimately they will effect the end of the human race by making our world too toxic to survive in.

On the other hand, that would be gravy for them, because they look forward to the end of the world. With that in mind, what is it that prevents them from simply destroying the world ASAP? I guess a person would not want to sacrifice their own salvation in order to bring about the apocalypse by destroying the world, since it is already promised to them anyway, and they should in fact endure the trials levied against them in preparation for the End of Days.

Also, and this is really my main point here. . . They should want to enjoy a long life in this place that was given to them by their god, and likewise they should show their god their worthiness by leaving this place as beautiful as they found it. If I build a house with the intention of letting my children live in it, and I promise to take them into my much more glorious house after judging how they live in the house I built for them, I would be more likely to take them into my house if they treated the house they lived in with due care and respect for both the place and each other.

America's Decline

To say that America is not declining is absurd. We're declining in both form and substance. Our government is in a perpetual deadlock of petulant brinkmanship and our level of social and cultural dialogue is embarrassing. This was punctuated for me on Friday in the comments of astronaut Scott Carpenter, who spoke at an event celebrating 50 years since John Glenn's historic flight, saying "There are lots of reasons behind our current predicament, but what it boils down to is the simple fact that when John and I went to work for this country, the United States was recognized around the world as a can-do nation. We have become viewed around the planet as a can't-do nation and I deplore that."

Why have we become this way? I think one of the primary factors is that the increasing complexity of modern society has rendered a large segment of our population feeling out of control and incapable of comprehending the technologies that operate this world. When a person feels out of control, he or she tends to clamp down, back up, reassess the situation, simplify, attempt to regain some semblence of control. In many cases, I believe, this is resulting in hebetude and withdrawal from meaningful social discourse.

This feeling of helplessness in the face of drastic global issues such global warming, economic collapse, serial killers, school shootings, genocide, human trafficking, environmental disasters, war and its atrocities, mass media, the 24-hour news cycle and its instant dissemination of every little hiccup, no matter how petty or grotesque, in excruciating raw detail, is causing people to react on a primal level. We are dealing with social issues that are beyond our understanding. Our primal minds cannot cope with the scale of these issues. We're treating issues that affect the whole of human civilization with a social intelligence that is overwhelmed by the nuances involved. Our primal instincts want to take over.

Precogs exist, but they're not people. . .

They're algorithms.

Pattern recognition algorithms can know things about you before you do. Tracking your daily routine: where you go, what websites you access and when you access them, your purchasing habits, your eating patterns, your social engagements, your work habits, etc., which thankfully are all in disparate and disconnected databases, if they're tracked at all, could be unified and mined to profile your psyche for comparison with other people's habits and mental states so accurately that it could actually provide foresight to actions that you have not yet even considered taking.

The amount of data we store about ourselves - all of which can be considered behavioral data in some way - is so vast that we absolutely depend on pattern recognition algorithms to make sense of it.

Today our algorithms are primarily based on statistics. Numbers can be mathematically analyzed for normality and variance. What other considerations could make pattern recognition algorithms more effective? Like the human brain making a discovery, a prudent algorithm will consider many patterns when learning about behavior. Even pruning data, like the human mind forgets, can be an important factor. How should an algorithm decide when it's time to forget old data, or lessen their priority?

We can even employ several algorithms at once to produce independent results that can then be analyzed by a supervisory meta-algorithm. The work can be farmed out to several different computers, several different databases, as long as this meta-algorithm is orchestrating the work.

Thoughtful Conservatism

Knowledge is a journey, and many bright people tire and quit the journey after they have advanced past provincial jealousies but before recovering their receptiveness from vain and hypocritical liberals. That is what leaves people stranded in thoughtful conservatism. They become so contradictarian, they actually come to oppose their own natural will to empathy, trapped in the role of devil's advocate.

They have thought their way past rudimentary tribalism, but then become frustrated by the fops and skanks found gathering in the intermediate spaces of liberalism. The distastefulness of that scene causes some wise people to turn to another track entirely rather than pushing past to the more difficult but rewarding worldview of order from chaos: systems theory. The interconnectedness. Grey Murkiness. Soft paradoxical forgiveness that is human behavior.