If I were to say the words "pinball tournament," what kind of images would this conjure up in your mind? Now, would these mental images change if I appended the words, "at a classic arcade/bar"? A couple of months ago, I wouldn't have thought anything of it. A pinball tournament is a pinball tournament, right? I would have also added, "Is there really such a thing as a pinball tournament?"
Indeed there is! At least, now there is. A few months ago, I took a random last-minute vacation to Portland, OR that I conveniently tacked on to a work trip to Atlanta, GA. It turns out making a stop in Oregon, even for two weeks, on my way from Alaska to Georgia is free. Having saved up a ridiculous amount of vacation leave at work, I decided to burn a couple of weeks just wandering around Portland by myself, staying in a shady looking motel with a giant neon palm tree, in a shady yet ultimately safe-ish part of the city, for $45/night. My mission was twofold:
You don't have to believe me when I say this, but I swear I didn't plan this trip around the pinball tournament. It was just a lucky coincidence, as I thoroughly enjoy flipping steel balls at flashy reactive gadgetry. While I would never purport myself to be any kind of pinball guru, despite soaking up the ins and outs of Whirlwind and Funhouse in the truly fantastic Wii game Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection, I figured the $10 entry fee was a mere pittance to participate in something so potentially great. Plus, I enjoy this idea of voting with my dollar. I vote for Wikipedia and such nonsense as pinball tournaments.
Figuring I hadn't a chance in the world of being a serious contender, my big questions were less about what tables I'd be competing on and more along the lines of, "Just how many people will this event attract?" This question was promptly answered with an absurd 121 people, as person after person stepped into the not small, but also not large, arcade. An arcade that I would wager exceeded its maximum occupancy for at least several hours that day. Which inevitable gives rise to an equally important question...
How long does a pinball tournament pairing 121 competitors on 26 pinball machines, with full-fledged tournament brackets and three games per match last? At least nine hours, as fate would have it. Perhaps those five words, "at a classic arcade/bar," take on a special significance after all. What do 121 people do during the 8+ hours of collected downtime between pinball matches at a bar/arcade? They drink the hell out of Pabst Blue Ribbon. If I've fallen into the habit of speaking for everyone, I apologize. But if the vast majority of people at this event hadn't been inebriated, and also taking into consideration I had done a fair amount of drinking myself, how do you explain this.
Despite the misspelled name, I tied for 10th place, playing on four pinball tables I had never played before: Theatre of Magic, Spider-Man, Stargate, and White Water, fueled with PBR every step of the way. But apparently so was everybody else. In fact, by the time I lost and left, it seemed like every flat surface in the entire arcade had an empty can of, you guessed it, Pabst Blue Ribbon sitting on it.
Other highlights include eating a metric ton of BBQ, bringing a table full of seven loners like myself together into a lively pinball and King of Kong conversation, eyeing the Dig Dug machine to which I would later return to set the high score of 224,000+, having a discussion about height with a 7'0" man who otherwise looked like an average Joe, but turned out to be a fellow named Todd MacCulloch, trying my damndest to find the warp whistle, and being absolutely slaughtered on my fourth and final match on the White Water table, where my opponent routinely scored 20x mine.
I never quite realized how people could justify spending hundreds of dollars on "an experience." Now, for better or worse, I can. All it took was a pinball tournament.
June 12th, 2009 - There's a little crack in all of us
"Your nerd is showing" is a new phrase I've heard used once or twice now, mostly around the office. And if one's nerd can show, I fear there will be nothing left to be seen after I'm done with this.
I can't speak for everyone or all universities, but in my experience, a Computer Science education is pocked with rare moments of sensationalist amidst a mostly humdrum flurry of math equations and arbitrary scienceness. I suppose it's good I "learned" this material in college, otherwise I would never in a million years had the motivation to learn it on my own. But then again, I haven't used much of it for anything at all. And again still, I tend to learn what I need to know as I need to know it. Don't we all? Where did five years of my life go?!
But if I were to pick one homework assignment in particular that sticks out as a singularly enjoyable experience, to speak nothing about its power to unite a classroom, it would be the computer cliche that is MD5 password cracking. If "MD5" means nothing to you, see if you can plow through its Wikipedia article. But basically, the backstory as I understand it is that Linux and/or UNIX used to store user passwords as MD5 hashes accessible by any user on the system. This turned out to be foolish because, as computers became more powerful, suddenly cracking MD5 hashes by "brute force" methods became feasible. Linux moved these hashes to a protected "shadow" file where normal users couldn't access it, and that was that. Feel free to correct me on this brief history lesson.
Professors continue to use MD5 password cracking as a fun, scary, thought-provoking exercise for freshman- and sophomore-level Computer Science students. It's one of the few treats able to reign us students in after many multi-month bombardments of high-level arbitrariness. Again, even when I speak for us all, I speak only for myself ;)
My MD5 story reads as such: The professor of my "Information Assurance" course also happened to be teaching the freshman-level C++ programming course during the same semester. I'm not sure if she properly explained her diabolitry to the other students, but at one point she made each of them type something "they might use as a password" into a little program that saved and hashed these words into neat little MD5 nuggets. She then gave the MD5 hashes to our class and told us to crack the living Hell out of them (more or less). The game was afoot.
I swear by the good book, few things in life are as exciting to me and my kind as cracking these stupid strings of gibberish. It's like solving some strange sodoku puzzle, and it makes us feel accomplished. Special, even. Yes, special might be the word indeed. Turn up The Prodigy and we might even attain that holy grail of Nintendo generation computer people. We might actually feel like we're in the movie Hackers. Hack the planet!
So, our assignment was to use whatever means we could muster to break as many of these hashes as possible. We were to list all cracked passwords on the piece of paper we turned in. To add a twist of fun to all of this, if my foggy memories serve me true, my friend RJ who was in the other class had entered "fuckyou" as his password. Needless to say, this was one of the easiest passwords to crack, and an entire classroom full of students did what they had been longing to do for years, turning in an assignment with the unequivocal words "fuckyou" plastered across its midsection.
Everyone in this class had their personal computers working around the clock to uncover more. I came home from school every day ecstatically hoping to find just one or two more lines of letters displayed in my terminal window. Just one or two more passwords, please! When the assignment had passed, it was as though The Nothing had sucked the life out of us all, and like Atreyu mourning the loss of his horse to a pool of horse-hungry magic mud (?), we were bummed.
Some years later, around mid-2007, always eager to come up with novel programming projects, I created a very basic game for my co-workers and I. The idea was mostly the same, but using SHA-1 hashes instead of MD5. Start with 100 hashes and try to crack as many as you can. But to make it even more appealing, borrow some influence from crossword puzzles and sudoku such that any progress one makes unveils clues to help them make more progress yet. A cracking game that feels like crack? Crack your way to more crack, in the form of an arduous quest? A CrackQuest, if you will?
The game is still up and running, growing older by the day, reveling in its ugly design, if you'd like to give it a shot. If you know nothing about programming, this should be the goal you work toward. I submitted the link to Digg just to see if it could garner a following. It received a total of eight diggs; just one of many examples of how work has skewed my perception of the masses.
As a closing comment, if you've only cracked 71 hashes, you have not yet won. I'm looking in your direction, kuza55, whoever you are.
Last night, on a whim, I watched the movie Examined Life at the Living Room Theaters in Portland, Oregon. I almost had to, as I noticed on the description it had an interview with Slavoj Zizek. Who is Slavoj Zizek? That was precisely the question I sought to answer. The only thing I knew about him up until this point was that he represents the philosophical wing of Laibach's satirical quasi-state, NSK, and he co-wrote the book Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK, a book that would probably make me lose what precious marbles I have remaining if I ever found the time to read it. On the upside, at least I haven't purchased an NSK passport yet.
Two days before seeing this movie, I had noticed a big hardback book by Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes, on display at Powell's. In the day betwixt, I overheard a woman who looked Croatian to my uncultured eyes talking to her friend about Slavoj Zizek and his cultish following. Who is this guy, and why do I become more scared of him by the day?
From what I saw in the film, he is far less imposing than I expected him to be. He was fired up but down to earth, speaking about ecology while interviewed at a waste processing plant. One of his points, if I understood his rapid-fire diatribe correctly, was that humans ought not to think of themselves as separate and/or interfering with nature. New age movements to return to nature should be dismissed. Humans should continue to do what they do, but find purpose and beauty in their own waste, as ecologists are enthralled by compost heaps. What a strange topic for a ten minute interview for a philosophical smorgasbord of a film, was my first reaction.
I attended the Oregon Zoo today and it got me thinking, as zoos typically do, "What is natural?" Within minutes of walking through the front gate, I heard speakers making canned hippopotamus moans and cougar screams. There were two hippos lying down, lazy as can be, knowing the speakers were doing their work for them. I saw a monkey lounging about in a plastic lawn chair and two black bears sleeping on a tire. Of the very few genuine animal sounds I heard, one was that of a parrot inside an atrium whistling the theme song to the Andy Griffith Show. If animals can so quickly adapt to what nonsense we throw at them, maybe Mr. Zizek has a point. Maybe it's arrogant of us to assume, even in our own self-criticism, that we have somehow already transcended nature?
Whether or not that was where you were going with this, Slavoj, I must say few things in life are as trippy as a parrot spontaneously whistling the Andy Griffith Show theme song.
What does it take to get people talking?
Have you ever noticed how quickly people get to know each other when things go wrong? The other day, on my vacation, one of Portland's light rails (electric bus/train things) experienced a mild derailment and, lo and behold, everyone crowded around and started asking each other questions. On a recent airplane flight, a woman started going into diabetic shock on the plane, and again, everybody started talking to each other.
As an extreme example, people often speak about what a horrible day 9/11 was. Not to be offensive here, but I would say that, perhaps in the most selfish way possible, neglecting the death and destruction on that day for a brief moment, it was actually one of the better experiences of my day-to-day life. Why? Because everyone, absolutely everyone, was talking to each other. In classes, around TVs, on sidewalks, at restaurants and stores. Everywhere. I had never seen anything like it.
For the following week or so, it suddenly because 100% socially acceptable to randomly talk to anyone, anywhere, anytime, and have a reasonably deep conversation. The moment people grew confident they knew what was going on, whether by watching 14 hours of CNN or what have you, the national conversation died down little by little until things returned back to normal. Normal is not a good place to be.
Have you ever been around some unknown folks when an electrical transformer exploded half a mile away? That'll do, too! Loud, unexpected noises. They work every time. Unexpected silences work, too. I get more enjoyment than I admittedly should from failed fireworks displays for that very reason. I know what fireworks ought to do. But if they do what they should, that's nothing new. I've seen working fireworks before. I see them in my mind's eye the moment I hear or read the word "fireworks." If you catch me at a fireworks show, I am the bad mojo hoping everything goes wrong, because then, ta-da!, people start looking at each other, eyebrows raised. People start asking questions. People start talking.
If I could somehow create a city of my own, it would have very loud speakers hidden in traffic lights and manholes throughout the sidewalks. A random number generator would determine when and where to play sudden explosive noises from the hidden speaker infrastructure. The sounds would rarely play in the same place twice, and perhaps anywhere between six and 37 days would pass between each synthetic sonic boom. None of this would ever be explained to the denizens of Boom City USA, and, lest they grow complacent, a new sound bite would be loaded into the central iPod shuffle terrorizing the streets bi-annually. We might carry the momentum by throwing in sounds of glass shattering, roaring thunder, the tried and true hippopotamus moans and cougar screams, and maybe top it off with a little bit of the old Cloverfield.
By the end of the year, everyone in this hypothetical city will have met everyone else, I promise. And, with any luck, Boom City USA denizens will be so afraid to leave their homes that they'll keep in touch over Facebook alone, just like the rest of us.
What about these guys?
On the NBC show To Catch A Predator, they often use 18- or 19-year-old stand-ins who look far younger than their actual age to greet pedophiles at the door. Why put real 14-year-olds at risk, right? And child labor laws probably make it infeasible anyway, unless they pull an Olson Twins, a la Full House.
But if these stand-ins look young enough to fool pedophiles expecting to find a 14-year-old girl standing at the doorstep (and there are episodes where this happens), my question formulates itself thus: Do these 19-year-old girls who look 14 years old have boyfriends, and are their boyfriends then pedophiles too?
I've made what might be described as a preliminary effort to read Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing. A Book of Practical Counsel, first published in 1949 and considered by many, Warren Buffet included, to be the closest thing there is to an investing bible. No no, this is not just Craig swooping back down to his website to deliver a third stock market entry. I may have, at last, finally worked this obsession out of my system, replacing it with more wholesome, social hobbies.
Though it is certainly a quality book, having made it to page 50 or so, my favorite part thus far is the opening quote to the "Commentary on Chapter 1." It goes like this:
All of human unhappiness comes from one single thing: not knowing how to remain at rest in a room. ~ Blaise Pascal
I love it. I find it equal parts offensive and true. Okay, well, first one needs to forget the whole employment thing. Then, remember that all quotes are overly simplistic and generalized; otherwise they wouldn't be quotes, but instead essays, treatises, maybe books? The fact remains, in the end we all manage to feed ourselves. All other unhappiness comes from ambition, which is how I interpret this quote.
Ambition! What the hell is wrong with us? We have what we need but we always want more. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? More to the point, is it a merely a cultural thing? If it's a cultural thing, are the unambitious among us lazy cowards, or are they freethinking individualists? Or maybe it just comes down to their personality, in which case I would argue they are neither. They just are, just like the overly ambitious just are. Level of ambition is just one of a handful of unalterable traits of a person.
As a person who used to be perfectly content just chilling, I have to admit I'm a bit jealous of those who continue to be content doing the same. Jealous to the point of bitterness. Bitter to the point that if I weren't a more tolerant person, I might criticize a person for their lack of ambition. But the more I think about it, the more ambition is like faith to me. You either have it or you don't. Blessed are those who don't. I think this was Pascal's point.
Humored by this Blaise Pascal quote, and fresh out of a science/religion discussion I attended last night, I couldn't help but be reminded of an entirely unrelated philosophical stance from the same thoughtful man, known as Pascal's Wager:
If you erroneously believe in God, you lose nothing (assuming that death is the absolute end), whereas if you correctly believe in God, you gain everything (eternal bliss). But if you correctly disbelieve in God, you gain nothing (death ends all), whereas if you erroneously disbelieve in God, you lose everything (eternal damnation).
How delightfully logical. It can even be put in table form:
BELIEF IN GOD
DISBELIEF IN GOD
CORRECT
Eternal Bliss
Nothing
INCORRECT
Nothing
Eternal Damnation
At worst, if you incorrectly believe, you might miss out on a few earthly pleasures. Or, if you're like many of the Christians I know, you might not even miss out on those. Thus, the question that's so obvious it doesn't need to be asked is, "Why doesn't everyone believe in God just to be on the safe side?"
As with any classic philosophical argument, there are several ways to counter this. One criticism is, if one decides to believe in God based on potential rewards, are they believing in God for the right reason? Likewise, if one decides to believe in God because he or she fears the consequences, are they believing in God for the right reason? We hear of "God-fearing Christians" as if it were a virtue. I'd like to extend this even further by asking, if one decides to believe in God because everyone around them believes in God, and they just want to fit in, are they believing in God for the right reason?
Those are arguments I've heard. I'd like to put on my philosopher hat and add my own contribution if I may: How can one decide to believe in God, anyway? What does that mean? In the midst of a polite domestic religious debate with my father, I once asked, "If I offered you $1 million to believe in Santa Claus, could you do it?" If you can find a reasonably intelligent person over the age of 20 who can do such a thing, you will be disappointed to discover I don't have a $1 million to give, Benjamin Graham be damned.
Sure, everyone can claim to believe in Santa Claus. One might even be able to surround themselves with a community of people who claim to believe in Santa Claus. As an aside, however, if you're planning any trips to the city of North Pole, Alaska for this purpose, you will be sorely disenchanted, finding this community unable to reconcile the belief in Santa Claus with their ardent beliefs in Jehovah and methamphetamine.
This feature marks a profound difference between folk religion and organized religion: those who practice a folk religion don't think of themselves as practicing a religion at all. Their "religious" practices are a seamless part of their practical lives, alongside their hunting and gathering or tilling and harvesting. And one way to tell that they really believe in the deities to which they make their sacrifices is that they aren't forever talking about how much they believe in their deities - any more than you and I go around assuring each other that we believe in germs and atoms. Where there is no ambient doubt to speak of, there is no need to speak of faith.
True, we don't live in a tribal community that practices folk religion, so this may be an unfair comparison. Still, when a Christian asserts his or her belief in God, it always makes me wonder how much of their assertion was intended for me and how much served as an internal buttressing of their own beliefs. If one tells the same lie often enough, does it not become their truth?
What is belief in God? How many Christians literally believe Jesus rose from the dead, and how can we sort them out from those who have "decided" to believe, or from those unfortunate few who desperately want to believe but find that they are unable to do so? What I find in Pascal's Wager is the cold, logical skeleton for a passioned entanglement of doubt and reassurance.
If I may switch gears yet again, creating a journal entry that will surely end up being thrice as pretentious as I hoped it would be (please direct your attention to that bit about being ambitious), I have found that, if genuine faith proves to be the Achilles' heal of Pascal's Wager, the same framework suits the needs of the free will debate like a glove. I am one of those creepy few who honestly believes humans do not have free will. A disturbing thought, no doubt, until I realized it makes no fundamental difference in my day-to-day life. Why? Because, despite this unsettling belief, I live my life by my own free will version of Pascal's Wager. UltraMuffin's wager? Hey, Plato used a nickname too!
The best illustration of this is whether it would be sensible to subject a cold-blooded murderer to the death penalty. [Note: This example, perhaps erroneously, assumes the death penalty is an agreeable form of punishment.] If the murderer had a choice in his crime, then it could be argued that he deserves to die. If he didn't have a choice, what authority do we have to end his life? We might make society safer, but is it fair? Let's assume that it's not. Let's break it down like this:
BELIEF IN FREE WILL
DISBELIEF IN FREE WILL
CORRECT
Punished
N/A
INCORRECT
N/A
Unpunished
In this case, the one explicit decision to punish the murderer is completely justified, as the murderer had chosen to take another person's life. If we decide the murderer had no choice in committing his crime, letting him go unpunished, when he in fact did have a choice, we did an incredible disservice to society. But how can we act on the principle of "innocent until proven guilty" if we can never know for certain whether humans have free will? What if the murderer was fated to commit his crime, but we put him to death regardless?
Fortunately, when it comes to matters of the free will of humanity as a whole, this conundrum is easily solved by the fact that, if the murderer didn't have a choice, neither does the judge, jury, or executioner. Where the table says "N/A," the burden of ethics is lifted from us entirely, as, without free will, neither the murderer nor the persecutors can do anything other than what they were destined to do. Whatever happens happens, and nothing we think or do can change that.
In both of the two instances where we actually have a choice, we'd be well served to put this killer to death without toiling over issues of free will, as in the two instances where we actually have a choice, putting the killer to death is in fact the correct choice. The remaining two cases are irrelevant from an ethical perspective. Hypothetically, it would be a shame to put a fated man to death, but in this case, the very premise of a choice-less universe excuses the punishment - it had to happen. Hence, there is absolutely nothing to be lost from believing in free will. Philosophical discussions aside, I tend to forget I believe in determinism, so this works out quite well.
If it works for me with respect to free will, does it also work for religious folk with respect to God and biblical miracles? In other words, am I just a hypocrite who likes to write? Now that's a question that deserves a table of its own.
I have a small but serious complaint about your website. When I load the front page of www.chase.com, I'll type my username into the username text input field, hit Tab to go to the password field, and every once in a while, my text input "focus" will be switched to the Search text input box in the upper-right corner of the page automatically. What's so bad about this? I sometimes end up typing some or all of my password in plain view in the Search box through no fault of my own.
I've since learned to be careful about it, but I can't imagine how many other customers are being affected by the same behavior. It just seems very dangerous to me. Even more dangerous when you consider how many people have their browsers set to save their form/search history. I.e., I'll bet there are a lot of people out there who have their Chase account password inadvertently saved in plain text as an auto-complete option for your upper-right Search text input box.
I can't remember off-hand which browsers and operating systems I've encountered this problem with. I've verified that it happens in Firefox 3.0.7 on Mac OS X 10.5.6. I suspect it affects nearly all browsers, after looking at this chunk of source code from your page:
<script language="JavaScript">
function placeCursor_micro(){
if (document.forms.logonform != null){
if(document.forms.logonform.usr_name.value.length > 0)
document.forms.logonform.usr_password.focus();
else
document.forms.logonform.usr_name.focus();
}
}
</script>
I think what's going on is that I start typing my username in before the page completes loading. Every once in a while, I'll finish typing my username and hit Tab at the exact moment the page finishes loading and the Javascript is executed. So, Javascript shifts focus to the password input box a split-second before I hit the Tab key, so it acts like I hit Tab twice, thus sending me to the Search text input box. Then I proceed to type my password, paying more attention to my keyboard than my monitor.
I know, I know... if I had taken the time to learn "home row" typing better, this wouldn't be a problem. But I'm afraid the majority of us type like monkeys.
Thank you,
-- Craig
March 11th, 2009 - Seattle vs. Portland - The Ultimate Showdown
Governor Sarah Palin did attend Wasilla Assembly of God since the time she was a teen ager. She and her family were a part of the church up until 2002. Since that time she has maintained a friendship with Wasilla Assembly of God and has attended various conferences and special meetings here. This June, the Governor spoke at the graduation service of our School of Ministry, Master's Commission Wasilla Alaska.
We have had some inquires into Governor Palin's beliefs. We do know that Gov Palin is a woman of integrity. She is a servant of the people, she is a strong leader. As for her personal beliefs, Governor Palin is well able to speak for herself on those issues.
As Alaskans we are excited about our Governor being selected as the nominee for Vice President. As residents of Wasilla, we are ecstatic about one of our own being thrust to the national forefront. However, as a church, it is not appropriate for us to endorse any one candidate over another. As believers, we are reminded in 2 Peter 2.13 that we are to submit to those in authority. 1 Timothy 2.1-2 tells us pray for those in authority. This we will do no matter who is elected. We wish the best to Governor Palin, and Senator McCain, as well as to Senator Obama and Senator Biden.
From: ultramuffin@yahoo.com
Sent: Wednesday, September 03, 2008 11:42 AM
To: wag@wasillaag.org
Subject: Interpretation of 2 Peter 2.13 (Official Statement Concerning Governor Palin)
Dear Wasilla Assembly of God,
In your "Official Statement Concerning Governor Palin," you state that "as believers, we are reminded in 2 Peter 2.13 that we are to submit to those in authority."
I looked up this verse in the King James Version of the Bible and found this:
"And shall receive the reward of unrighteousness, as they that count it pleasure to riot in the day time. Spots they are and blemishes, sporting themselves with their own deceivings while they feast with you;"
I see nothing in this verse that could be construed as a reminder to submit to authority. Can you please elaborate on how you reached this interpretation?
Thank you and God bless,
-- Craig
------------------------------
From: wag@wasillaag.org
Sent: Wednesday, September 03, 2008 12:09 PM
To: ultramuffin@yahoo.com
Subject: RE: Interpretation of 2 Peter 2.13 (Official Statement Concerning Governor Palin)
Oops... That should be 1 Peter 2.13. You are the first one to catch that.
At least we know there one person out there that reads their bible...
Thanks for catching that. We'll get things changed.
Wasilla Assembly of God
Wasilla, Alaska
www.wasillaag.org
------------------------------
Too late.
December 4th, 2008 - A Thursday's serving of mundane paradoxes
Why does Bose advertise their Wave Music System on TV?
Several years ago, on what must have been a extraordinary boring night, I watched part of an infomercial for the Bose Wave music system, a tiny little device that fills the room with sound. I had to admit, for a sound system that small, the music seemed to be of an incredible quality. Not that I ever considered for a moment purchasing the thing, for my days of buying gadgets simply because they are cool are long gone.
But fortunately for me, after I turned off the television and a subsequent hour unfolded, after the infomercial poison had lapsed, I was delighted to discover that I could have my cake and eat the whole damned thing too. I could have the Bose Wave music system without buying it. In fact, I already did. The music had been emanating from my television speakers the whole time. Speakers, I might add, that were a fraction of the size of the Bose Wave music system. My own crappy television had performed all of the magic. So, as it turned out, I had just watched a show that convinced me to enjoy what I already owned. What a noble cause.
The same absurd contradiction applies as much to commercials for HDTVs, commercials for HD cable, and Blu-Ray advertisements on DVDs. These ploys no doubt work, but why? And for that matter...
Was anyone paying attention when weight lifting suddenly became "easy"?
Bowflex, I'm looking in your direction. Maybe memory is playing tricks on me, but I could have sworn I've heard a home gym commercial or two that starts out, "Quit messing with heavy weights..." as it shows a man in spandex lifting a weight off the floor to fasten it to a barbell. Excuse me? Heaven forbid a weight lifting enthusiast would need to lift a weight before lifting weights.
What color are mirrors, exactly?
It would give me great pleasure if you took a moment or two to picture a mirror. Now, tell me what color it is. You and I both know what a mirror does, so no need to go into superfluous detail over mirrors reflecting colors. If you were to pick a single color, what color would you use to describe a mirror? If you insist on beating around the bush, here's a hint: the process of repairing a mirror is called "re-silvering." Mirrors are silver. And you knew that!
Is it just me, or does this not make any bit of sense? Hey, I've made plenty of headway in becoming a normal, functional, social member of society, but I've got to say... sometimes it becomes a little much and I just need to take a mental holiday and contemplate mirrors for an hour. It's healthy. Trust me.
Somebody once told me that zero is no more a number than infinity. There have always been clues to that effect, as, used as literal numbers, neither zero nor infinity make a whole lot of sense. This point was driven home by my recent run-in with the book Wittgenstein's Beetle and Other Classic Thought Experiments. We often find zero on the outer fringes of reason. For example, what is 0 divided by 0 if we were to follow the following rules:
- 0 divided by anything is 0
- Anything divided by itself is 1
All riddles aside, the correct answer is "undefined," the formal mathematical term for "does not compute." But that fails to put me at ease because this is the same nonsense that plays through my head whenever I look into a mirror. E.g.,
- A mirror is whatever color it reflects
- A mirror is silver
They can't both be right, can they? Forget black and white. Silver is the non-color and the every color, yet altogether nothing of the sort? I would never describe a window as silver, but mirrors have always just seemed like backwards windows to me. And how does Silver's big brother Gold fit into all of this?
Do we really need polar bears?
I think polar bears are cute, too. I'm not sure why they have a greater right to life than the handful of insects that go extinct every day, but whatever. My concern is that, if they actually went extinct, how would we know? Would it ever be more than words on a newspaper or website? If not, then what's all the fuss about? I live in Alaska for God's sake and the first time I ever saw a polar bear was in a zoo in Utah.
But I suppose then we would have less polar bear footage to show on TV. I fear this to be the true tragedy. Maybe what we ought to be doing is filming what polar bears we presently have in the world 24 hours a day. Then, once the bears go extinct, we can ration out four unreleased hours of polar bear footage per year for the next umpteen years. As far as we are concerned the polar bears will live on, as cute TV footage and textbook factoids are the only way most of us knew them in the first place. The zoos can be populated with animatronics and TVs filled with CG polar bears once the real footage runs out, and we'd all be happy because we'd still have something cute to look at while three species go extinct every hour.
Not to accuse die hard polar bear fans of being conceited or anything, but they do strike me as the type that would cut down a hundred trees on a hillside to get a better view of the forest.
While we're on the topic of epistemology, how do you personally know the world is truly round?
During my freshman year of college, my enthusiastic calculus professor mentioned in passing that many, if not most, things in the world can be modeled with mathematics. At the time, I failed to grasp the power and optimism of this statement. After having interacted with scientists working with computational models for the past two years, I think I am gradually growing into the excitement and reality of my calculus professor's bold assertion. Nonetheless, like a mysterious Chinese store owner warning not to feed your Gremlin after midnight, my professor offered that the most prominent exception to the rule was the stock market. The stock market seems to be one of the purest examples of something that cannot be modeled consistently or reliably.
Why is this the case? It's not merely the fact that the stock market is man-made and 100% driven by human activity. If the human element rendered mathematical analysis moot, the advertising industry would collapse, and people might for once in their life wonder why money is so crucial to political campaigns. In other words, a person's realization that they are being influenced to the brink of manipulation by any number of things under the sun is not adequate enough reason to go against the grain. Toss the proverbial cherry on top, however, by adding a direct financial incentive, and suddenly you've made each individual keenly aware of their own participation and, consequently, breathed life into a fantastically complex, endlessly dynamic system.
To be sure, patterns do exist in the stock market. But Dr. Calculus' point was that any time a pattern is identified, it is immediately ripe for exploitation. The moment one of these patterns is exploited, it has the effect of normalizing that aspect of the market, putting an end to what phenomenon had just been discovered. Unless an analyst were unwilling to profit from his/her discovery, and humble enough to keep their discovery to their self, any new discovery will die as quickly as it had been found. So I was told. But it certainly rings with truth, provided that the most confident stock gurus don't know what the Hell they're talking about. Presumably, once this cycle of discovery and exploitation occurs, it leaves in its wake a market with one less thing to be discovered. What patterns remain are even more cloaked in a shroud of irrational number shuffling. If you've ever been fortunate enough to have seen the movie Pi, you already know how this ends (drill to the brain!).
This is where technical analysis comes in, but there is debate over whether it actually works, and if so, to what extent. One might also use neural networks to attempt to identify patterns in the stock market that, for some reason or another, humans are unable to detect. (For a highly readable introduction to artificial neural networks, and how they can be evolved from retardation to be expert checkers players, or detect breast cancer, I recommend reading the book Blondie24.) The battle between humans to out-think one another fades to the periphery as computers do the same thing on a higher and far less comprehensible level. Whoever has the beefiest computer has a distinct advantage in the stock market arms race. If you are not a seasoned programmer, you would shit your pants if you knew what your own personal computer is capable of doing along these lines, whether it can run Fallout 3 or not. The thought that financial analysts have a need for HPC clusters, despite not surprising me, both blows my mind and begs the question: what are they capable of doing with these machines and what are they doing?
Does this Terminatoresque machine war invalidate the more primitive, flesh and blood, "just like Grandma used to make," human stock-investing strategies? Not only am I lacking an answer to this question, I'm utterly devoid of a guess, educated or otherwise. If both humans and machines have already overthought the market to death, if there is a sort of overanalysis deadlock situation going on here, it would seem to me that all strategies have equal potential to be useful. With respect to mutual funds, this is essentially Vanguard's philosophy. If 75% of actively managed mutual funds underperform their respective index, and it costs money to manage a mutual fund, why not be smart by being stupid and opt for the zero-intelligence product. If we are facing the law of dimishing returns here, why not pick whatever plan is simplest, easiest, or most interesting.
Guided by these boring-drive-to-work musings, I've begun doing what so much literature has advised against. They call it "swing trading," because it will nauseate you like a tire swing. No! It's like day trading, which, incidentally, seems to be one of the most profane phrases in American English. Day trading on longer time intervals, basically. That's all it means. By swing trading, I would no longer be investing, but merely gambling with (if played correctly) better than Vegas odds. But by realizing this is gambling, I never put myself at risk of becoming overconfident - perhaps the most dangerous factor in this whole equation. It's still up to the individual to come up with a sound strategy. What follows is mine.
Note: I am an unabashed fan of Linux. People occasionally ask why I prefer Linux, what advantages it has over Windows. I have not once had a clear, concise response to this question, yet it invariably ignites an electrical storm in my head. Below is an example of why I prefer Linux.
Thought #1
The market is extremely volatile at this time. The market is extremely volatile during all recessions. While neither I nor anybody else can guess with any certainty when the market downturn will end, we can be reasonably sure the market will bounce around like nobody's business until it recovers.
Single day market fluctuations are one indication of market volatility. A 1% change in the S&P 500 in a single day is not uncommon, but significant all the same. How many daily 1% S&P 500 changes have occurred per year for the past 30 years?
There seems to be a loose correlation here. Okay, I feel warm and fuzzy enough.
Thought #2
While I often feel like I'm about to run onto a shooting range any time I entertain the notion of investing in individual stocks, I can ride the market turbulence more violently by investing in chunks of the stock market as opposed to a broad index like the S&P 500. The more stocks are encapsulated in an index, the more of a muffling effect it has. Let's pick an index of one of the stock market's twelve sectors instead. One that has had the crap beaten out of it but is bound to recover. The financial sector. While we're at it, let's make its daily fluctuations twice as extreme by buying a crazy-ass leveraged ETF. UYG, whose Google Finance discussion group seems to think is some sort of intangible pirate ship, will fit the bill nicely.
Let's compare the daily 1% changes per year for:
- S&P 500
- IYF, which is an ETF created in 2000 to track the performance of the financial sector
- UYG, the 2x leveraged financial sector ETF, which, unfortunately, has only existed since January 30th, 2007, so it has yet to exist through a full year
YEAR
S&P 500
IYF
UYG
2000
101
81
--
2001
102
107
--
2002
126
124
--
2003
81
82
--
2004
42
43
--
2005
29
39
--
2006
27
32
--
2007
66
90
144
2008
102
158
187
Thought #3
Strictly adhering to a brainless strategy might get me into the least amount of trouble:
- Buy low, sell high.
- Never, under any circumstances, sell at a loss.
- Don't put all of my eggs in one basket (with respect to price), because no one knows just how low the market will continue to sink, and I don't want to lock up all of my money all at once. Use dollar cost averaging.
- Use Zecco for ten free trades per month, and $4.50/trade thereafter.
Thus, for the past two weeks, this is what I've been doing. I buy $X worth of UYG at each dollar interval lower than its current price. E.g., when UYG was at $10.21, I set limit orders to buy $X worth of shares at $10.00, $9.00, $8.00, and $7.00. As the stock fell in price, my limit orders bought more shares at an increasing rate. Each time a limit buy order was triggered, I set a limit sell order for that price +$1. When I bought Y shares at $8, I turned around and sold Y shares at $9. The shares bought at $9 are set to sell at $10, the shares bought at $10 are set to sell at $11, etc. If all of my limit sell orders are triggered and the stock price continues to rise, I will start moving the limit buy orders from the bottom of the stack to the top of the stack. The $7 order will become the $11 order, the $8 order will become the $12 order, so when the price inevitably falls again, whenever and at whatever price it happens, I will be right behind it to buy more. So far, I have had two "round trips" that bought at $8 and sold at $9, and despite the ETF price being lower than where I had initially started buying it, I am still ahead in the context of this little project (all of my previous, long-term investments are currently being brutalized).
Once a group of shares are sold, I set the limit buy order back to what it had previously been. But I also re-average my non-invested money and distribute it amongst my limit buy orders, with the effect that all limit buy orders are set to buy even more shares than they previously had. Over time, the number of shares for limit buy orders will gradually increase, more so if the market remains suitably turbulent, as I suspect (or hope) it will for at least another year.
But already, over the course of two weeks, I've discovered a minor kink in this strategy that has cast doubt on all of Dr. Calculus' assertions, or perhaps my interpretation of them. Is it really so difficult to find patterns in the stock market? We have already seen that the market becomes more volatile in times of recession, but that can be dismissed as the stock market reacting to worldly news. The stock market does not exist in a vacuum. Bad news typically has a negative impact on it. This might be called a pattern, but if one cannot anticipate the news, it's not a very profitable pattern. Those who can anticipate the news are gods among men.
I noticed, over the course of two weeks, that two of my limit orders had not executed even after the ETF reached their targets. When UYG fell to $7.00, my $7.00 limit buy order did not have enough time to react before the price quickly jumped back up to several cents above $7.00 and hovered there for what seemed like hours. When UYG jumped up to $10.00, my $10.00 limit sell order did not have sufficient time to react before the ETF price raced back down to several cents below $10.00 and hovered there for what seemed like days. (Your senses have a way of lying to you. Not just your sense of time, either. What do you see in your blind spot? Visual lies. You are also color deficient in your peripheral vision, but good luck convincing yourself of that.)
Are there so many people like me out there, buying and selling on even dollar increments, that it actually has a noticeable impact on stock prices? This is too primitive, too easy. There's no way it could possibly be true. Isn't this precisely the sort of thing that could be exploited in some way? This has got to be the power of suggestion at work. The fantasy of superstition. Wait... I still have a Linux bash shell open, Sherlock Holmes' magnifying glass for the digital era.
What happens if we lump together all the historical highs and lows of UYG and count the occurrences of each cent mark, from X.00 to X.99?
It would appear that human nature has taken over. People prefer dollar increments, then 50 cent increments, then 25 increments (kinda?). There's not enough noise in the stock market to gloss over this reality, as the highs and lows of UYG tend to gravitate towards these pleasing values. And then shortly thereafter, everybody's limit orders fire, repelling the price to either direction, back from where it came or onward, where it will then gravitate towards the next pleasing value. Or loiter tantalizingly close to the same value for the rest of the day, bouncing off of it now and again for a split second. And I'm getting screwed because this happens too quickly!
I would suspect that we don't see this gravitation towards pleasing values in the S&P 500, as an investor cannot directly buy the S&P 500 index, only a product based on it. The S&P 500 is merely the sum of the prices of its 500 constituent stocks, which would effectively smooth out or eliminate the strange phenomenon observed above. So, what's it look like?
Makes sense, although the overall downward slope defies explanation. Let's try Google:
Cool. How about something from out of nowhere. How about Mattel, the toy company?
It's kind of there, kind of not.
What if we take a look at some of the more massive companies, like General Motors, McDonald's, and the disaster that is/was AIG? But only from 2001 onward, because there was some strangeness with these stocks before 2001 that I as yet have no explanation for. Strangeness:
GM,
MCD,
AIG.
Now is the time to reevaluate everything I thought I learned in college.
Remember back in high school, the first time you may have been forced to learn a foreign language? I do. I picked Spanish because it was supposedly one of the easier languages to learn. I have never regretted that decision, either. Sure, I listen to an alarming amount of German music (because German speaking countries seem to be the only place where industrial music is still alive and kicking). But I have never once had any desire to know what the lyrics actually meant because I know, somewhere deep down, that as scary as those deep, raspy words sound, I'm in fact just listening to Austria's version of Linkin Park. And it would be nothing short of catastrophic if I ever found out for sure. So, take the meaning of your German language and bury it in its cryptic vault on the other side of God's green Earth where it belongs.
I was also taught that learning a foreign language exposes one's mind to a whole new way of thinking. To use the linguistic toolbox of a second language to unlock previously unfathomable thoughts. Or perhaps I'm being too romantic about this. I don't know. I never became fluent in Spanish or any other language, having only lived through two lowest-common-denominator semesters of Spanish class followed by an intense summer of computer games, erasing all traces of the language from my feeble brain. The only word I remember to this day is "afeitarse," only because I was the rare seventeen year old gifted enough to have a full-fledged beard in high school. I heard this strange word at least twice a day.
A book I am currently reading, Breaking The Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel Dennett, argues that language allows us to ponder abstract properties of objects that would otherwise have been inseparable from the objects themselves. Maybe the abstract is more intuitive to you than the concrete, in which case I would be sorely disappointed if you didn't subscribe to David Hume's Bundle Theory. According to Dennett, language allows us to mix and match abstract properties as we see fit, producing in our minds' eyes unseen, unlikely, or unequivocally absurd results:
Human memory is biased in favor of vital combinations, but so, presumably, is the memory found in the brains of all other animals. Animal memory has probably been relatively impervious to fantasy, however, for a simple reason: lacking language, animal brains have not had a way of inundating themselves with an explosion of combinations not found in the natural environment. How is an anxious ape going to concoct the counterintuitive combination of a walking tree or an invisible banana - ideas that might indeed captivate an ape mind if only they could be presented to it?
To me, this is vaguely reminiscent of the story To See and Not to See by Oliver Sacks, which was the basis for the movie At First Sight. In this story, a man blind since a very young age regains his sight, but, to the puzzlement of himself and those around him, he realizes he is unable to see in any meaningful sense. Why? Because his mind was missing visual concepts. Without concepts, and by extension the words that convey them, there is nothing to separate a mountain from a meadow, the sun from the sky, or even to correlate spoken words to their speakers. Objects would have initially been irreducibly lumped together as one thing, known as "the world" or "sight." For this unfortunate man, all visual concepts and objects needed to be learned from scratch, systematically and laboriously, as a substitute for an early phase of childhood development those of us who have had vision our whole lives would be hard-pressed not to take for granted.
As a unilingual person speaking from a position of ignorance, I would assert that this is precisely what a second language affords us with respect to the ability to synthesize new, previously unthinkable thoughts: further divisibility, abstraction, and precision. Metaphorically, more colors for our palette, with more prepackaged mixtures and smoother gradients. If I did learn another language, I would most certainly want it to be sign language, for reasons of my own. I wonder if that counts.
The other important thing I learned in high school Spanish class, besides the fact that drug dealers buy a lot of EA Sports Dreamcast games, is that English is an extremely difficult language to learn. How fortunate, says the 11th grader inside of me. I don't need to do anything and already I've done the impossible. I know English! Who's with me? But-- hold the phone. Not so fast. At what point does one truly "know" a language? When they know some of it? When they know all of it, or at least all of its grammatical rules? If it's the latter, I would argue (fervently!) that none of us actually know English. It's true, some of us know more than the next person, but who actually KNOWS the rules of English? All of them, from beginning to end, the alpha and the omega. Nobody, really. Think you're the one? Come step up to the plate.
I've heard a thing or two about so-called "simultaneous developments" throughout history. Parallel discoveries, concurrent inventions, coincidental musings, what have you. An animated likeness of Ethan Hawke spoke of this in the quasi-film Waking Life. We are told that Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton both discovered calculus at roughly the same time, independently of one another. Much of Charles Darwin's and Alfred Wallace's work on the theory of evolution had been fleshed out before they began collaborating.
There is nothing mystical going on here, so far as I can tell (and it is precisely my inability to wade through mysticism that grants me due authority in my privileged position of "some guy on the Internet"). To me, all of the alleged simultaneous independent intellectual developments throughout history point to just one of many unnerving realities of the human condition: creativity is little more than rearranging bits of knowledge and experience and connecting dots between them. Not just science and mathematics, mind you, but the arts too. Music, novels, humor, they're all just sausages synthesized of the ground of chunks of sausages that came before them.
Try to think of something brand new. Say something random. Do this now. I'd say there's a one-in-five chance whatever you just said had something to do with monkeys, because somewhere along the way, perhaps 180 years ago, a bored patron visiting a zoo watched a monkey scream and do a backflip, decided that monkeys are the zenith of randomness, then handed this bit of knowledge down to posterity to be used and abused for all eternity. Back during my online gaming days, there was a person who played under the name "93% Soiled Loaf". That person, and that person alone, was able to create thoughts out of nothing. Everyone else, me included, are just trying hard enough to fool ourselves.
Not that this realization necessarily detracts from my perception of the world. Progress is still being made. Lacking the capacity to bring anything wholly new into this world does not negate the worth of one's works or thoughts. But it can be frustrating for an individual hellbent on being creative (e.g., UltraMuffin a mere handful of years ago; skim through years 2003-2005 of my website to witness me in the violent throws of disjointed thoughts with no substance). My new aim is to go with the flow, adding my own twist to what happens to trickle by, all the while being cognizant of the streams of thought to which I elect to subscribe. Note: In general, you should sound the bullshit alarm the moment a person plants the word "cognizant" in a conversation. There are far less pompous ways to say the word "aware." This is an FYI effective hereafter. Don't let me catch you falling for it again.
With that in mind, please be aware that, for the past month, I have been reading a book titled Lost Christianities, listening to Laibach's Jesus Christ Superstars album on an endless loop in my car, and even willingly attended two unfamiliar local churches for no reason in particular (are there any ethical considerations for starting a church review website?). I've had Christianity on my mind again. Let it not escape the torrent of scrutiny, here. According to some of the more radical literature I've read, there were a number of ancient religions that paralleled Christianity in numerous respects. Does Christmas really belong to Christ? If so, which Christ?
Some Christian apologists credit these similarities to the downstream influence of Christianity on other religions. I.e., Mithraism thrived by swallowing up elements of other religions, chiefly Christianity. Syncretism, you see, a fancy word for "turbulent theological melting pot." With each new piece of information that comes along, it seems increasingly likely to me that syncretism is how all religions were born, not unlike all other things of this world. Voodoo is a particularly fun example of Christianity gone astray. Everyone's guilty. Even the Greeks commandeered Dionysus from an ancient elsewhere. December 25th is the religious equivalent of that green spinning wireframe skull animated GIF from 1995. It was so cool that, come 1996, every website on the world wide web had it. In light of the fact that Jesus had a lot in common with various religious figures who came centuries before him, I find it rather doubtful that Christianity escaped the turmoil unscathed or otherwise uninfluenced by the rampant syncretism of its formative era.
But where am I going with this? I wanted to learn OpenGL. I accidentally made it through the entire Computer Science bachelor's program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks without taking a graphics programming course. Graphics programming is supposed to be the cherry on top. For many students, it's the sole reason they major in Computer Science in the first place. What is a course anyway but an opportunity for me to zone out and daydream? I'm a book learner, so I bought a book and read enough to get me going, stopping short of textures, lighting effects, and fog. That's right. I can program simple blocks of solid colors, which, incidentally, is as far as ambition took me:
I like brick bash games, especially the 3D variety. I love Arkanoid. Where other brick bash games added power ups to, for example, spawn multiple balls or widen the player's paddle, Arkanoid went the extra mile by arming the player with a gun to shoot away blocks. But what if we were to combine 3D brick bash with Arkanoid? We could call it "3D Arkanoid." If we're lucky, we might even get sued! But why stop at space gun power-ups? Let's have blocks exploding, taking other blocks with them. And what to do with all of the extra CPU power present in any modern gaming device? It would be a damn shame to let that go to waste. Let's add some physics so the blocks react realistically to the explosions. Let's give the blocks different point values to add extra incentive to being precise. Hell, let's ditch the old brick bash paddle style of gameplay and allow the player to "toss" the ball at piles of bricks, attempting to throttle the toss velocity to hit the best targets (high valued blocks, or exploding blocks). The balls will need to be affected by friction and gravity so they don't bounce around forever. Basically, I've just mentally morphed my 3D Arkanoid idea into something more like the crash mode of Burnout 3, except with blocks and balls.
How would I implement this toss throttle, exactly? Click and hold down the mouse button while a colored vector expands, sort of like in the game Worms. Or, how about I experiment with these Wii Remote libraries that keep popping up on the Internet. Maybe I could rig this game up so the player literally tosses balls at the blocks using motion controls. Maybe I could figure out a way to make motion controls work better than 50% of the games on Wii. Just maybe. What simple fun this could be. What an original idea, right?
I hate you, Steven Spielberg. You are to video games what George Foreman is to grills.
I wonder how much of an impact Looney Tunes had on my developmental years. No other cartoon I know of is better at capturing the social milieu of the times, but these cartoons are ancient. As such, they are dangerous. Although if given the choice, I would have rather spent the entirely of my childhood watching Duck Tales, Ninja Turtles, and Rocko's Modern Life, there happened to be a surplus of Looney Tunes. Decades upon decades of short animations accumulated to overwhelm the competition. They spanned half a century, as evidenced by the fact that color left the drawings just as quickly as it came, telegrams gave all appearances of being an essential component of modern living, and Bugs Bunny himself morphed, twisted, and mutated in ways that betrayed my trust as he bounced back and forth between the eons. Meanwhile, children like me were indoctrinated with various notions about the world that had long since fallen from favor.
To what extent? Part of me is afraid I'll never know. And if I never figure it out, I can do nothing else but live my life realizing that the Warner Bros. laid much of its permanent foundation. Maybe this is what it is to be an American. Burgers, baseballfootball American Idol, and Looney Tunes. What we all more or less have in common. The lowest common denominators, as they could be called.
What kinds of falsities and half-truths did they shove down my throat before my critical reasoning faculties had developed? That's easy. I need only ask myself the question, "What did I believe before the age of ~eight that ended up making me feel like a fool?" The easy targets.
Criminals, especially burglars, wear striped black-and-white clothes
Do they? Did they ever? Maybe it is in Warner Bros.'s best interests not to depict criminals wearing radical Nickelodeon orange jumpsuits, lest we all grow up in a world where premeditated murder is punishable by slime. The Hamburglar hasn't brought a wealth of reality to the table, either. When I was perhaps four years old, my mother emphasized the importance of using a deadbolt to lock doors to the outside world. She and my father had learned the hard way, unfortunately, when, many years prior, a burglar had broken into their house and stolen my mother's jewelry.
At four years old, I learned a new word: incredulous. I looked deep within myself and decided that, if I were anything at all, I was most definitely incredulous. Here my own mother was trying to convince me that a person wearing striped monochrome clothing, who may or may not have had a fat plastic head and donned a cape, broke into their home to steal gold and diamonds. My eyebrow was officially raised. Pure forces of evil were now escaping from the television set. Oh, wait, criminals look just like you and I? I'm frankly a bit surprised I am still alive.
Creepy men, in general, look like Steve Buscemi
I'm not sure, maybe I'm alone on this, but what struck me most about Steve Buscemi when I first saw him in movies such as Desperado and Billy Madison is that he looked like he jumped straight out of the older black and white episodes of Looney Tunes. Every so often, they'd draw a creepy, greasy, weird-lipped, middle-aged white dude into a cartoon for dramatic effect, all along blissfully unaware that they were drawing a future flesh-and-blood celebrity. I think it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. It took the collective consciousness of America to promote a run-of-the-mill unattractive man to the ranks of "superstar creepy," and Looney Tunes had collected our consciousness decades earlier.
Mars is like Troy, if Troy were built of girders and located on the moon Thanks, Carilyn!
Marvin the Martian is to Martians what Taz is to Tasmanian devils. Is he the only person on Mars? What's with the Trojan getup? And why does Mars have it in for Earth? We've been kind. What does Mars honestly have against us?
If I were a betting man, I would wager instead that we're past due for gimpy ol' Pluto the dwarf planet to come shooting up our solar clubhouse in the turbulent throws of his dilapidated orbit. Me, I've never felt terribly threatened by the red planet of telescopes, illudium Q-36 explosive space modulators, and other such assorted manifestations of the make-believe, Trojan imps be damned.
Bombs look like bowling balls, and crates of TNT are clearly labeled
One time, just one time, I would like to glue a fuse to a black bowling ball and drop it in the key/change bowl on the way through airport security. What would they think? Would they laugh? Would they have a dog sniff it? Would three other different colored versions of me come running out from the corridors, drop their own fused bowling balls within my vicinity, then run away giggling and still manage to blow themselves up?
It would be like the time I bought a 20-pack of AA batteries from Sam's Club, which incidentally were all packaged in a single row, then stuffed it into my carry-on bag before the conveyer belt x-ray. This was not an intentional joke, so imagine my surprise when the TSA found what appeared to be an ammo clip in my backpack. I was a man on a mission, dead set on annihilating an army of koopa troopas by sundown.
It's always reassuring to see how quickly video games infiltrate every last one of my musings.
Hell is underground, firey, and full of Yosemite Sam
I may need to wait another 60 years for confirmation, but I strongly suspect that the Warners lied about this one, too. In any case, it sure made it difficult to make sense of Sunday morning sermons. I guess it could be worse. All Dogs Go To Heaven still gives me goosebumps.
Tasmanian devils look like Taz, and they spin
Lies! I think the animators lost the "T" volume of their Encyclopedia Britannica and just decided to wing it. I see absolutely no correlation between Taz and Tasmanian devils. Tasmanian devils just look like gnarly burnt dogs to me. Taz looks like a walking mouth covered with hair, that turns into a tornado at will. Do Tasmanian devils actually spin in any way, shape, or form? Do they roll around? Do they have violent fits? Are they a force to be feared?
The answer to all of these questions appears to be an unequivocal "no."
Coyotes are unable to make informed purchases
What you do with the Road Runner once you catch him is your business, Wile E. Coyote. But for god's sake, quit wasting your money. ACME has burned you. ACME has burned you bad. Take some of that tension out in an angry letter or a bad review. I would never consider buying a Badonkadonk Land Cruiser without first skimming the reviews a bit. How many times will rockets blow up in your face before you order a different catalog?
I can't tell you how many times Paper Mate pens have ruined my day. And you know what? I'm through with them. I'm through with them and all who support them. Want to be my friend? Use Bic. Want to be my girl? Then there can be absolutely no Paper Mate between us. I'd go to Bangkok if I wanted a whore. ACME has never done any good for anyone. They've been on my shit list since 1989.
Now, just imagine where we'd be if the Censored Eleven were never censored?
May 24th, 2008 - If you have a choice, you should read this
I've always been fascinated by the debate over free will vs. determinism. Do we in fact have any control over our destiny? Okay, free will may only be partially responsible for that. To bring this debate more down to Earth, when you lift your arm, is its movement really the consequence of your consciously willing it to move? If you've never taken a philosophy course or read the neuroscience books I have, the question sounds absurd. Of course your arm moves because you make it move. How could somebody argue against that? There are, in fact, many ways to argue against this.
First of all, if you're a strict believer in science, physics in particular, you should already be wondering how free will is possible. The world is governed by the rule of cause and effect. Y happens because X happens. Y has no choice. There is no decision taking place. How can humans exist outside of these rules? Why should we believe we are not simply extremely complex computers, constantly converting a truly overwhelming amount of sensory input into distinctive outputs like behavior and personality? This is where people will often interject by blurting out "quantum physics!"
Not that I'm qualified to speak on these matters, but, like Mars, a billiard ball, or a bullet, neurons are too large to be significantly affected by the uncertainty of quantum physics. If you believe quantum physics is responsible for the free will of mankind, you should also believe that billiard balls can and routinely do defy intuition. That's a poor example, I suppose, for the game of pool has taught us all to be a little more skeptical about geometry. If you are a strict scientist, you probably already believe that what we call our mind is just the cognitive sensation of various chain reactions of neurons, set off by sensory inputs.
Okay okay, but maybe science is just a bunch of ignorant hocus pocus spouted by unenlightened elitists. What if the mind is not merely a side-effect of brain activity. What if our minds are actually otherworldly souls, resting above and outside of this universe. Something only God can understand? Right about now, you should be asking yourself exactly what God this is. Is this the Western God? The more or less common God of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam? The omnipotent, omniscient, creator of the world who instilled us with free will?
As the classical argument goes, how can people have free will if God is omniscient? If we take omniscience to mean that God knows the future, then there's no two ways about it: we have no free will. If we have free will, even if God knows all of our possible actions and all of the possible actions that stem from those actions, into a limitless tree of future possibilities, we must acknowledge that there is at least one crucial piece of information God does not yet know. He does not know what path we will decide to choose. Thus, such a God is not omniscient. He's a charlatan.
Those are the two extremes. Two highly abstract, thoroughly unpersuasive examples to prove the same point, disturbing as the point may be. Another interesting stance is that of soft determinism: Yes, we are merely machines that convert inputs into outputs, cause and effect style, just like anything else in the universe. It would be a mistake to believe this happens in a spiritual vacuum, however. The way inputs arrive as our outputs is determined by our personalities, our decisions, our minds. The self is the missing link between sensations and behavior. It's true that we do not have free will, as there is only one possible outcome given the inputs available to us. Nevertheless, this outcome is determined solely on the basis of who we are. Human consciousness, not the mysterious workings of an impersonal brain, turns the gear to complete the universal system of determinism, at least where it concerns humans. So, we do have a choice? But at the same time, we only have one choice to choose: the choice we ultimately do choose. If we could rewind time and play it back again, everything would happen exactly as it had before. In any given situation, our one and only choice is distinctly ours -- so much so that it was effectively predestined. Therefore, we do not have any choices in life, just the appearances of them.
Hmmmm... how did we get back here? It's like being caught in a house of mirrors. No matter where I look, what approach I take, or where I think I'm going, I end up where I started. If I'm given more than twenty minutes to think about it, I invariably arrive at the same conclusion. There is no way free will can possibly exist. Yes, this is all quite fun. Philosophical musings to be pondered during one's downtime, with not a wit of evidence to support them. Or did I speak too soon? What does world-renowned neurologist V.S. Ramachandranhave to say?
... Now let's go back to normals and do a PET scan when you're voluntarily moving your finger using your free will. A second to three-fourths of a second prior to moving your finger, I get the EEG potential and it's called the Readiness Potential. It's as though the brain events are kicking in a second prior to your actual finger movement, even though your conscious intention of moving the finger coincides almost exactly with the wiggle of the finger. Why? Why is the mental sensation of willing the finger delayed by a second, coming a second after the brain events kick in as monitored by the EEG? What might the evolutionary rationale be?
The answer is, I think, that there is an inevitable neural delay before the signal arising in the brain cascades through the brain and the message arrives to wiggle you finger. There's going to be a delay because of neural processing - just like the satellite interviews on TV which you've all been watching. So natural selection has ensured that the subjective sensation of willing is delayed deliberately to coincide not with the onset of the brain commands but with the actual execution of the command by your finger, so that you feel you're moving it.
And this in turn is telling you something important. It's telling you that the subjective sensations that accompany brain events must have an evolutionary purpose, for if it had no purpose and merely accompanied brain events - like so many philosophers believe (this is called epiphenomenalism) - in other words the subjective sensation of willing is like a shadow that moves with you as you walk but is not causal in making you move, if that's correct then why would evolution bother delaying the signal so that it coincides with your finger movement?
So you see the amazing paradox is that on the one hand the experiment shows that free will is illusory, right? It can't be causing the brain events because the events kick in a second earlier. But on the other hand it has to have some function because if it didn't have a function, why would evolution bother delaying it? But if it does have a function, what could it be other than moving the finger? So maybe our very notion of causation requires a radical revision here as happened in quantum physics. OK, enough of free will. It's all philosophy!
If you were to ask me what my favorite year was, I would plainly say that I honestly do not know. However, if you were to ask me what my most nostalgic year was, I would say 1999, and I would do so without skipping a beat. This is very curious. I have always thought of nostalgia as a linear function of time. The older the memory is, the more it is filled to the brim with irrational nostalgic fuzz. If I started retaining memories at age ~four (a rough guess), it seems like that should have been my most nostalgic year. But 1999 is. Why? Oh, I know why. I can explain away the whole damned reminiscent supernova lodged in the back of my head with only three key strokes: V64.
1999 was a four course meal. If The Matrix was its hors d'oeuvre, then dessert was the cable modem secured by Fall, and Starsiege: Tribes was the handful of hedonism I seize from the giant taffy bowl at The Turtle Club in an ill-advised effort to recoup any losses sustained by a $32 dinner. The main course? 64 letter V's stacked on top of a regular-ass Nintendo 64, sitting in the midst of a universally jobless summer.
Or V64 Jr. to be exact. What I hadn't realized until the latter half of 1998 was that, ever since the original Nintendo Entertainment System, perhaps earlier, various outfits in Hong Kong had been producing cartridge emulators. Not software emulators like you download on a computer and drool over, then vow to beat every SNES game you could never afford as a child... for about two weeks. Hardware based cartridge emulators are a much stranger breed, and I wanted one desperately. After finding that the V64 and the Z64 exceeded the modest budget of a lowly teenager, I eventually accumulated enough money by the late Spring of 1999 to order Bung Enterprises' brand new, stripped down, product. The V64 Jr. Otherwise known as The Nexus of Fairbanks.
I was ecstatic when the thing came in the mail, partly due to the fact that I had sent a $170 money order to some back-alley Internet electronics store I had never heard of before. I might as well have planted my money in rich soil and hoped it would grow into a V64 Jr. I immediately played all of the N64 ROMs I had been stockpiling from FTP sites and the bullshit that was Hotline since I ordered the device. Maybe 80 of them, maybe 100 by this point. Each game, whether it was garbage or gold, from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time to Pokemon Stadium, received exactly ten minutes of my time. I seemed utterly incapable of committing any more time to a single game, as this was more time that could be spent raiding FTP sites and Hotline servers, or, once things got really out of control, renting N64 games and ripping ROMs for myself.
It was a rapid and vicious cycle of consumption that ultimately brought me no satisfaction, and worse yet, left me disoriented as the hobby that had brought me so much joy since I was six years old seemed to have lost all of its value over the course of a month. The hobby? No, not video games. Accumulating stuff in general. Vaguely aware of the basic tenets of Buddhism, I was beginning to feel like Siddhartha Gautama on a miniature but no less profound scale. No amount of additional crap was going to fill the rest of the crap with meaning. Games were more fun when I only had a few of them. Now, the sense of fun had been replaced with an overwhelming and thoroughly unpleasant burden to enjoy what I had. The $170 V64 Jr. was simultaneously the best and worst purchase of my life, just as Hackers is paradoxically both the best and worst movie ever produced.
I remember casually mentioning this device to my friend Zach, who later became Kapuni, in the locker room after gym class, where the stale scent of adolescence filled the air with an olfactory likeness to spoiled broccoli if not all-out rust. "Yeah, Perfect Dark is pretty cool. I have a piece of plastic I jam into the cartridge slot of my N64 that allows me to play the ROM from my computer." It must have sounded just as dubious as his "All Star Grandpa" gym t-shirt. Two days later, Zach showed up at my front door with a skeptical look on his face.
I think we played Bomberman 64. Or Turok 2. Or BattleTanx. More likely, we played all three games and twenty more. I now found myself in the possession of maybe 200 games by this time, up to and including Superman 64. Money lost to piracy? I don't think so. If there is a single person out there who legitimately owned 200 N64 games back in the day, at $70 a pop, that person was either in exceptional financial circumstances, or would otherwise have been a good candidate for a face full of orbitoclast half a century earlier to cure their obsessive behavior. I had owned my Nintendo 64 for two years prior to coupling it with a V64 Jr., and had owned all of one game: Super Mario 64. Why? We all know why. The N64 was the digital equivalent of my experimental Tang milkshakes. Sluggish, texture-less, and hopelessly orange. A fool's enterprise.
Enter the weekend. The programmable doorbell rang its apathetic anachronism, Jingle Bells indeed. Zach and his cool brother Special K were at the door, ready to be marginalized by a swelling well of hideous games. We confronted the likes of Forsaken 64, Rampage World Tour, Castlevania 64, and Vigilante 8. The next weekend, Zach and KC and ThunderChunk showed up at the same door. Then Drew's brother, his cousin Gerrit, his brother's friend, and Zach's friend Skrumf (RIP). By the time there were seven or eight regulars frequenting my house, it was summer time.
My brother had just graduated from high school, and freshly branded with sharks on his shoulder, he decided to spend the next couple months hanging out with his friends in the basement of our house, playing pool and such, before shipping off to basic training. Three more regulars entered Act II: Jack, Chris, and the tall quiet guy who looked like John Romero. They came for billiards but grew captivated by the bland Bung box. In short order, WCW/nWo Revenge entered the regular rotation of games.
This also happened to be one of those rare summers when my aunt, uncle, and cousins flew in from Maryland for a month visit. What did my cousins like to do? Play video games. Then two guys from school whom I barely knew found out where I lived. Nello and Shawn would randomly show up at the door. Out of what added up to perhaps sixteen people summer suckling the V64 Jr., Nello might have been the only one employed. However, he started clocking in at his job at Westmark Hotel in the morning only to drive to my house and play N64 for nine hours before clocking out at the end of the day. This worked for exactly four days, and then there was uniform unemployment for all.
Soon after, my brother asked of my parents to let one of his school acquaintances live at our formerly tranquil house for a week. They permitted this. Chris II and his clingy girlfriend dove into the throng. Chris, incidentally, happened to be acutely skilled in the arts of Goldeneye 007 and San Francisco Rush 2. "Do you have Goldeneye or Rush 2?" he asked. "Chris, allow me to direct your eyes to the gray piece of plastic protruding from that Nintendo 64 on the floor. Its magic knows no bounds." Chris wasted no time unleashing his unique brand of carefree ass kickery, and the entire congregation of Fairbanks 12-to-20-somethings endured his wrath. It was earth-shattering. In fact, I already wrote about this.
When I blindly downloaded the Japanese version of an as yet unreleased in the states game called Super Smash Bros., the rest of summer was spoken for. I'm pretty sure all parties involved remember this summer with the fondest and strangest of memories. I remember it as sort of a modern Breakfast Club in which the library had been replaced with a V64 Jr. and detention had been replaced with unprecedented summer vegetation. People who would ordinarily never interact with one another spent weeks masquerading as Donkey Kong and Kirby, pummelling each other into the ground, athletes spouting incompatible traditions of trash talk that went sailing over nerds' heads and vice versa. In sum, there were a whole lot of people who really did not understand each other, but made an honest effort to do so.
If after reading this entry you have an irresistible urge to find and buy a V64 Jr., or buy more games of any kind, it may be to your benefit to read it again from the beginning.
February 24th, 2008 - Will $10.20 cost me $1031.52?
I've always wanted to understand the stock market. Last summer, the summer of 2007, the same summer I listened to a lot of Tech N9ne and got hit in the face with a Frisbee, I read The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing by Jason Kelly. Check out my book review, or flip through the little book review slide show I presented to the fantastically nerdy West Ridge Investor's Club. The book was quite basic, but I feel that it armed me with enough knowledge to make educated mistakes. Not random shots in the dark. I just ordered another book with a Christmas gift certificate, One Up On Wall Street by Peter Lynch, because apparently I am middle aged beyond my years. It's just something to pass the time.
The Neatest Little Guide told me to go to the library, which I did. I looked at some of the fastest growing stocks according to Investor's Business Daily (a newspaper with a retail subscription price of $295/year. Thank you, Noel Wien Library). I wrote down approximately 50 stock symbols, came home, entered them into a mock portfolio on Google Finance and watched and researched them for a few days. I eventually decided that NewMarket Corp (NEU) looked like a good investment. However, The Neatest Little Guide also told me to write down reasons why I like a stock before I even think about investing in it. How do I know if I like a stock? The book taught me how to know. Well, as best it could teach me the unknowable over the course of roughly 230 pages. Let's see if a $10.20 book manages to cost me $1031.52.
Reasons investing in NEU seemed like a good idea:
- The market as a whole is down, so it's a good time to invest in most stocks
- Investor's Business Daily SmartSelect Composite Rating of 99 on 02/15/2008
- Increasing volume over the past few months
- Added to the S&P SmallCap 600 Index on 02/12/2008
- It pays a dividend, which is not to be taken for granted with growth stocks
- Four consecutive years of increasing earnings (in millions of US dollars):
2004
2005
2006
2007
33.06
42.38
57.52
95.32
- Analyst estimates of even higher earnings in 2008 and 2009
- Has exceeded analyst estimates in the past
- High Return on Equity (TTM):
NEU
Industry
Sector
S&P 500
25.40
17.59
20.55
21.65
- Low Price / Earnings (TTM):
NEU
Industry
Sector
S&P 500
13.31
36.89
22.52
18.58
- Low Price / Sales (TTM):
NEU
Industry
Sector
S&P 500
0.70
4.01
2.56
2.55
- High Current Ratio (MRQ):
NEU
Industry
Sector
S&P 500
2.79
1.70
2.00
1.69
- High Quick Ratio (MRQ):
NEU
Industry
Sector
S&P 500
1.70
0.99
1.16
1.18
- Lots of insider buying by the Director of NewMarket Corp
And, not that I follow the chemical industry or anything, but this blurb on Afton Chemical Corporation, one of NewMarket Corp's two child companies, sounds promising in this day in age:
Afton Chemical develops and manufactures petroleum additives that enhance the performance of lubricating oils and fuels. From custom-formulated chemical blends to market-general additive components, Afton technology helps fuels burn cleaner, engines run smoother, and machines last longer. ... Fuel additives are chemical components and products that improve the refining process and performance of gasoline, diesel, and other fuels, resulting in lower fuel costs, improved fuel performance, and reduced fuel emissions.
Please be cautioned that this is in no way a certain success. I am a novice. I also noticed that NewMarket Corp has a relatively low Profit Margin. Does its historically increasing earnings counter this? Who knows. (Not me.)
I bought 16 shares of NEU on 02/20/2008 at a price of $64.47 per share. Grab some popcorn and join me. Let's see if this turns into a disaster. However, the stock price is free to do whatever it wants for a while. Based on what I've read, I consider the price immaterial until around April 30th, when NewMarket Corp is scheduled to report next quarter's earnings. Before then, I need to determine my criteria for selling the stock. But until then, I persevere!
February 16th, 2008 - Overplaying Super Paper Mario
The other day, as I was trudging my way through the mediocrity that is Super Paper Mario, I stumbled upon the following puzzle as the sole barrier to entrance into Flopside (as opposed to Flipside, you whacky 5D linear game):
There are eight strangely colored Super Mario style blocks. They all start out dark. When I jump up to hit one, it illuminates. But wait! There's more! It also illuminates several of the other eight blocks. So, if I jump up and hit one block, maybe three other random blocks will light up. If I jump up and hit the same block again, all of the blocks it had formally illuminated go dark again. What happens if I hit another block? The same behavior, except it will illuminate itself and another arbitrary handful of blocks along with it. Combine the illumination faculties of several blocks at once and all hell breaks loose, as blocks turn on and off seemingly randomly.
The video I attempted to make to demonstrace this turned out like typical YouTube crap. But I do have these GIFs:
The blocks start like this:
If I hit Block 1, this happens:
If I then hit Block 2, this happens:
Hitting Block 1 again does the following:
Etc. Though the real thing has more color to it.
Hours prior, while flipped into 3D mode back in Flipside (not Flopside), I happened to read a sign that said "eight blocks, one color each." How typical of these sorts of games that my clue would be nowhere near, neither spatially nor temporally, the puzzle to which it applied. This game has been reduced to a feat of memory. Why not just play one of those match-the-cards style memory games? Why indeed. Super Paper Mario actually contains one of those games in its hidden arcade room.
But let's focus. The clue says I need to illuminate all eight blocks? That's one hell of a clue right there. Had I missed that sign, I might have been stuck in this room for an eternity playing Simon with myself. I tested the waters by hitting a few blocks here and there. Toggling the eight blocks on, never off. Not intentionally, that is. There's no satisfaction in solving a puzzle unless you take the bait first. After five minutes of this, I said to myself, "You're better than this, Muffin. Solve it with your mind, not your fingers."
The most annoying part of this puzzle is that I could only see four of the eight blocks on the screen at any given time. Thus, after experimentally hitting a block, I had to run back and forth to examine the results. Over and over again. If I couldn't visualize the action with my eyes, how would I manage to visualize it in my head with even the slightest confidence? This was going to require paper and a pen.
As I fetched the pen and paper, it occurred to me that I had seen this puzzle before. I had solved sizable puzzles of the same nature back in 2002, 2006, and a little bit in between. This wasn't so much a puzzle as it was an old acquaintance from the days of yore. XOR! These blocks were just XOR operations on an 8-bit register, not unlike the 16-bit registers of EE 443 or the 32-bit registers of CS 301. Filled with these wonderfully nostalgic memories, I suddenly lost all interest in Super Paper Mario and once again felt like doing what I always want to do. Program! Forget solving this puzzle with my mind. That has now become immaterial.
When I was a young lad, before the Internet was around, I went through a brief phase of trying to enjoy crossword puzzles. The problem with crossword puzzles is that every puzzle has at least two clues relating to Robert Redford. Once those two clues are discovered, the game is kaput. If you are under the age of 40, you haven't a chance in the world.
If you don't know the crossword answers, you simply don't know the answers. If this happens frequently enough, if a big block of blank squares continues to dominate the center of the page, how are you supposed to solve the puzzle? It's not like sudoku. You can't flex your thought muscles into a solution. Fortunately, bookstores sell crossword puzzle dictionaries. Is this acceptable? If it is, would it not make more sense to simply use Google? Ravens are deemed intelligent if they use every resource available to achieve their goal. Humans should be judged by the same criteria. Having made this bold assertion, I claim that the smartest way a human can solve a crossword puzzle is to wait until the solution is published. Likewise, the smartest way to stay fed is to hang around the dumpster behind Mayflower Buffet. But when your goal is to gain a little more experience programming, maybe it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to play video games in the first place.
I recorded the eight Flopside blocks' behavior thus:
Ostensibly, there is only one correct block arrangement out of a possible 256. Some people model oceans. Others model ballistics or the atmosphere. I'd be doing the same, but, truth be told, I'm not much of an expert on anything but video games. Let's see what a little C++ can do. However, let the record show that I am not tryingtoplayfavorites here. If my Computer Science education serves me right, this should be one hell of a fast program. But if my Computer Science education had served me right, my program probably wouldn't be using a random number generator to kidnap the proverbial typewriter monkeys and coerce them into Flopside. Who am I trying to impress? Certainly not the motherfucking monkeys.
Let's go!
$ g++ -O3 -o flopside flopside.cpp && time ./flopside
What a stupid program. Why did I even do this? Because, like I said in a previous journal entry, clock cycles are going to waste and I ain't got nothing to feed them. Hell, why settle with one retarded solution? Why not generate one retarded solution to rule them all?
Take that, Nintendo! Sitting there, all smug, probably thinking you have the one and only solution, unwilling to share clues of any worth. "Eight blocks, one color each." Twenty years, and nothing's changed. Dodongo still dislikes smoke. So, is the common-knowledge solution Block 2, Block 3, Block 4, Block 5? GameFAQs knows:
Hit each block 1 time. Flip and enter the door.
How in the hell? Was I supposed to know that with such a cryptic clue? ... Oh wait, my words got flip flopped before I managed to flip to Flopside. It wasn't "eight blocks, one color each." It was "eight blocks, each color once." Well, that was several hours well spent. At least I know a little bit more about Fortran. Thanks, Mario!
Just recently, I finished reading a book titled The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness by Antonio Damasio. A synopsis can be found in my book reviews section, north of here. One of the points the author made was that human consciousness has a very narrow scope. You can think of it as a spotlight, illuminating whatever it happens to be pointed at, but surrendering all else to the whims of darkness. Consciousness comes in limited supply. Each waking moment is a fight to determine how best to distribute the consciousness you have.
Fortunately for us, not all of what we do on a day-to-day basis requires consciousness, even things that can optionally employ it. Breathing
Marvin the Martian is to Martians what Taz is to Tasmanian devils. Is he the only person on Mars? What's with the Trojan getup? And why does Mars have it in for Earth? We've been kind. What does Mars honestly have against us?
What you do with the Road Runner once you catch him is your business, Wile E. Coyote. But for god's sake, quit wasting your money. ACME has burned you. ACME has burned you bad. Take some of that tension out in an angry letter or a bad review. I would never consider buying a 
