Author: Marc

After work 12.5k in 1:09:18. That's 8:55 per mile. Moderate wind, sunny, and 91 degrees.

Author: Marc

"If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. I you teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime."

This is a long-lived old adage. Unfortunately, it is quite myopic. It assumes that he cannot out-reproduce his food source. In general, that is not the case. Man is a creature shaped by millions of years of evolution. Evolution favors not (as many or even most texts state) the fittest. Rather, it favors the most statistically powerful combination of fitness and fecundity.

If two beasts occupy the same niche and one is superior in both survival to maturity and reproductive lifespan, but the other has a ssignificantly lower maturity age and higher fecundity, the latter will win. Consider for a moment, the reproduction rate of low lifes as opposed to people with an education. Consider as well the average age of first child for low life females.

Well, marry this little nugget to the fact that the earth is only capable of supporting a finite number of people.

We are truly doomed.

Author: Marc

I did a late run after work of 10k in 51:24. That works out to about 8:16 per mile. I guess that isn't too bad considering it was 90 degrees outside and I had only run twice in the preceding two weeks.

Author: Marc

The aircraft descended through thick clouds to a dreary Chicago morning. I think this is my first trip to the Windy City. I often wondered of that moniker, as I recall reading somewhere that El Paso was windier, on average. I’ll have to look that up. I have found that it is not entirely reliable to trust one’s own memory. To take this one step further, it is entirely possible that I actually read exactly that, but from a questionable source. Into adulthood, our little brains accrue an enormous amount of information. Individual nuggets of information can easily be deformed to better fit the cramped quarters. This, I imagine, is why cantankerous old bastards can be so damned unreasonable. If a man knows something for certain and remembers it like it was yesterday, he would be well served to remember that a large number of yesterdays have likely passed since he formed that memory. In most cases, time-induced distortions are minor and the meaning of an event is retained. At times, however, critical differences between the actual and the remembered event can slip in. Aside from brief events, remembrance of emotions over extended periods of time can become nearly unrecognizable. The Leave it to Beaver world that many people remember from the 50s to the early 60s has undoubtedly been influenced by popular culture mythology of that era. When right wing nuts think back to these good old days, we should recall that the fears that did not exist back then have been propagated by the right wing nuts themselves. Before this becomes a disjointed dissertation of unfocused thought (I have been traveling for over 18 hours now, so I have an excuse), I will end on that note.

Author: Marc

Last night, aboard the 737 flying over Canada (I imagine… actually, I have no idea) I had some time to think. It may owe somewhat to the fact that I recently finished Richard Dawkins’ A River out of Eden and was reading Mark Twain’s very weird Letters from Earth, but I was thinking about religion. While in Alaska, it occurred to me that many of the people I was there with did something odd as their first task upon arrival. They sought the time and location of the Sunday worship of their particular brand of Bible-thumpery (they were all New Mexicans, practically implying that it would be the Catholic service). The guy two seats over (back on the plane here) was reading Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. The overt fascist bent of that book got me thinking about totalitarian states, which led me to thinking about the Soviet Union, which got me to thinking about Karl Marx. You may remember the quote “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” from his The Communist Manifesto. The obsession with control of mind-altering substances in America, from the temperance movement which led to the disastrously failed experiment of Prohibition, to the current anti-drug movement, has been directed almost entirely by religious leaders. Sex is one of the other great obsessions of the religious leaders. A third obsession is that of gaining political power. How are these things related? As I said before, I just finished the Dawkins book, which discussed evolution. Dawkins also introduced in his The Selfish Gene the concept of the meme. The meme could be thought of as almost a cultural equivalent of a virus. If it is successful, it replicates to a point of saturation, displacing competing memes in the process. If we think of the memes which could be characterized as mind-altering activities, it all makes sense. If religion is to maintain its stranglehold on humanity, it must suppress its competitors. Religious practices can be, at times, exhilarating. Anyone who has attended a number of religious ceremonies can definitely appreciate the degree to which we could consider religion a mind-altering activity. The drive for sex has been finely tuned over the last few hundred million years to keep itself at the top of the “to do” list for even self-aware creatures such as humans. People do stupid or even dangerous things under the influence of the sex drive. Consider that even fervent religious believers can be tempted into proscribed sexual behaviors even under threat of eternal damnation. Sex poses a very real threat to religion. A similar claim could be made for drugs.

Author: Marc

Well, it's done. I have already completed a large part of my approximately 24-hour-long trip back (time-wise, anyway). The weather here has been almost perfect for running most of the time. I should have been able to do a lot more, but I have never really readjusted my sleep schedule since I left for Kaua'i over a month ago. As such, I have been too tired to do much running. I did manage to get in a one-hour run and a great long run of about an hour and a half. I estimated that one at about 17 miles. Aside from that, two fishing trips netted me over 30 lbs of halibut, and a trip to the fish market rounded out about 50 lbs of fish with some red salmon.

Since I had so much time, I looked for a nearby restaurant to have one last meal in Alaska. I ended up walking about 2 miles from the airport to the far side of Lake Hood. I had some king crab legs, but it wasn't enough. I had forgotten that my entire caloric intake yesterday had been a sandwich. Since I had gone nearly halfway around Lake Hood, I decided to continue around the other side, circumnavigating the lake like a real half-assed explorer. I watched the seaplanes take off and land. They were berthed all along the shore of the lake. I took some video, but I found out that the memory card was apparently at its limit. I really should be better about dumping them. A sign proclaimed that this was the largest seaplane base in the world. I can believe it. One I got past the seaplanes, hundreds of regular small aircraft were arranged all along the path. There were evena number that were for sale. So if you have an extra $60k or so laying around, you might want to consider alternative transportation.

Anyway, I had the worst schedule for this, so I just hope my fish survives the journey. I left the hotel at about 10:30 this morning to fly at 11:30 (the hotel is about 200 yards from the airport). I will end up in El Paso at 12:30 tomorrow afternoon. I hope to be home about 1:30 pm. Including the hour time difference, That makes the whole thing about 26 hours. Damn.

Author: Marc

The Bible is the inerrant Word of God.

A quick thumb-through of the Book of Revelation reveals a little something that you, as a Christian, ought to know. You should give up. You have no chance.

Next month, the 2008 Olympic Games are scheduled to begin in Beijing, China. Good statistics are hard to find, so the best I can say is that approximately 4.4 billion in the 15-65 age group overall. That's too broad a range. We can narrow this down a little better by assuming that the U.S. is a good approximator of the world as a whole. This may not be true, but we more closely resemble the world's age distribution than any other developed nation, and underdeveloped nations don't tend to have very good statistics readily available. Based on U.S. age distributions, we could say that about 2.6 billion are of the 18-44 age group that is best represented in the Olympics. Again, we could reduce the number by saying that the overwhelming majority of Olympians are covered by half that age range. If we assume the population is evenly distributed in that range (again not accurate, but good enough for our ball-park estimate), then we say the pool of potential Olympians is reduced to 1.3 billion. Let us assume that each potential Olympian has his or her viable Olympic span as two Olympic games. So each individual has approximately a 2 times 10,500 over 1.3 billion or 21e3/1.3e9 = 1.6e-5 or about 1 in 62,000 chance of appearing at the Olympics.

Now the Christian religions include about 2.1 billion people. According to the Book of Revelation, Rev 14:1

1 And I looked, and, lo, a Lamb stood on the mount Sion, and with him an hundred forty and four thousand, having his Father's name written in their foreheads.

3 [the Angel to the other 4 angels] Saying, Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, not the trees, till we have sealed the servants of out God in their foreheads.

4 And I heard the number of them which were sealed: and there were sealed an hundred and forty and four thousand of all the tribes of the children of Israel.

5 Of the tribe of Juda were sealed twelve thousand. ...

[lists all the tribes of Israel and grants each 12,000 to be sealed, ending with] Of the tribe of Benjamin were sealed twelve thousand.

4 These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins...