I love the 4th. In some of my earliest memories I’m waving sparklers on my grandparents’ lawn - watching liquid fire drip off the tip onto the grass; white smoke, nostrils full of sulfer.. Fireworks are threaded through my life, and they have never changed for me. My reactions have changed, but they haven’t: I’ve always seen in them an ideal beauty, with nothing to grasp at or hold on to - no distractions as it were.

I can follow that strand of beauty back, and I see myself falling farther and farther away from it. When I was very young, fireworks simply made me happy. Even though the fireworks were used up, my happiness was secure because life was secure - I was confident of even greater good to come, of more holidays and more fireworks, and nothing had been irrepairably lost or broken.

I used to make fireworks (people often think I’m some pyro nut-job, but that wasn’t really it: who doesn’t want to create the thing they love?), and through that hobby I saw the possibility of change and a foreshadowing of my current position.

One year I put on a show for my cousins, which started well. There were several volcanoes (blue and purple) I was especially proud of. Near the end I set off a whistler. It was a new design, and instead of whistling it exploded - it flew through the air and struck my cousin Whitney’s ankle. She wasn’t injured, but of course it stung and she spent several minutes crying. Even though she was ok, I felt wretched the rest of the day. Here was a thing that seemed entirely beautiful, that had brought me only joy, and in trying to bring that joy to someone else I had brought suffering instead. The very center of things had become missaligned, and fireworks made me sad from then on.

They are still beautiful, and they fade, but now I cry afterwards, because I know some beautiful things pass away and never come back. I think of all the people I’ve hurt and the suffering I’ve caused, all the beauty I’ve destroyed, things I can never undo, and even though God can bring new good out of any evil, still the evil is done and the first good is gone. Of couse I know, as a Christian, that there is hope.. everyone plays “Born in the USA” today, but I always think of a different Springsteen song:

everything dies baby that’s a fact
but maybe everything that dies someday comes back..

Current mood: annoyed

I was in my bedroom drawing earlier today when I heard a TV commercial drifting in from the livingroom. The product being advertised was an “anti-aging” face cream fortified with caffeine, purported to take years off your face in just minutes!!! The line of copy that caught my attention was, “It’s got caffeine, it wakes your skin right up!”

There are three assumptions the copywriters are potentially making here that I find interesting.

1) Today’s successful woman (note this an expensive, high-end product) is completely ignorant of the biological sciences, particularly pharmacology. Caffeine acts only on the brain. Caffeine is not absorbed unless exposed to the digestive tract or mucous membranes.

2) Today’s successful woman is not just ignorant of the biological sciences, but also simply ignorant. Common sense tells us that topical caffeine will be doubly inneffective: We drink our coffee to get a buzz instead of dipping our hands in it, and even if we did dip our hands in our coffee, our skin does not look old because it is sleepy.

3) Today’s successful woman practices sympathetic magic. The caffeine in this product is functioning as a sort of tailsman. Caffeine wakes us up when we drink it, therefore it must contain the property of waking-upness, which can be transmitted through mere proximity. There is a confusion of ontological categories happening here. This is like eating the heart of your fallen enemy to absorb his bravery.

I find this commercial insulting and I’m not even a woman.

I got a bulletin today about seal clubbing. It’s been circulating for a while - I’ve seen it 3 or 4 times now - and it will no doubt be around until MySpace passes from us. It talks about hunters in Alaska and Canada clubbing baby seals for sport, from the perspective of the seal. The dialog is as follows:

wtf canada and norway
“we” animals are all gods creatures, have some fucking respect!
How would you like it to be whacked hard over the head as a “sport”!?
Norway and Canada have a new kind of tourism. Killing baby seals. They call it a “sport”..You want to call this a sport ?
You’re our only hope !!!
This barbarism shouldnt be possible in our society..
Dont turn your back on us, we are defenseless
I know these images seem painful for you, but we feel the pain. We are being slaughtered and its going on RIGHT NOW…
What gives him the right to kill us? Who is he to decide about life and death?
What kind of sport is this? I didnt harm anyone. I was just swimming around..
Please help me and my friends…
You cant just ignore these images.. Keeping silent and doing nothing makes you guilty…
Please help us
Please dont leave us alone…

A representative picture:

Before considering the issue, it is best to clear up some misconceptions. Baby seals are not hunted for sport but for their pelts, which are valuable because of the soft fur. They are clubbed instead of shot for several reasons. First, clubbing the seal doesn’t put a hole in the pelt. Second, seals that are shot often escape under the ice where they die slowly, and the hunter looses his quarry. Guns are employed when the ice is too weak to support the hunter, but otherwise clubs are more humane and more effective.

People read this bulletin and are outraged - they feel as if the hunters are committing murder. I will admit, I feel the same. Emotions can be unreliable however. Are we justified in feeling this way, or are we being misled? Does the bulletin even present an argument?

Examined objectively, it asks plenty of questions but otherwise doesn’t say much. It is effective because of certain foundational assumptions. To consider the bulletin’s contents we must first enter it’s frame of reference, a frame of reference in which the immorality of the hunter is a foregone conclusion. The writer doesn’t need to make an argument - by listening we have already agreed.

The narrator of the bulletin is a seal. It speaks as if it understands it’s situation, and even makes philosophical and ethical conjectures. Most people would deny that seals can reason, but the issue is never brought up. The seal’s intelligence must be presupposed for the dialog to even make sense (otherwise how could it talk to you?), so by reading we have tacitly agreed without considering the question. This is like being asked, “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?” The point of contention is concealed in the premise and sneaks in under the radar, as it were.

If the seal can reason, we must agree with it on all points. “Yes, Mr. Seal, of course it is terrible that your family is being murdered. This kind of thing should never be allowed in civilized society. I’m sure that with the help of the police we can have these people put away. Your testimony will be more than enough to convict..” WTF! I’m talking to a seal! Seals are not intelligent beings. No doubt they feel pain, but they most certainly do not suffer like us because they are not self-aware. Male seals eat their offspring on a regular basis - perhaps we should try them in court? The idea is absurd because a seal is not a person and cannot be morally culpable. In the same way, it can be killed, but it cannot be murdered. Only people can be murdered. It may be wrong to kill seals for their pelts, but it is not the same as killing a person.

Why is it so easy to view seals as people? I can think of two reasons. First, speaking from an animal or object’s perspective is a common literary technique, used to inspire sympathy. We are accustomed to stepping into the shoes of animals, and it is easy to forget the device is rhetorical, not logical. (or perhaps the distinction between rhetoric and logic has collapsed…)

Second, seals look like people. More specifically, baby seals look like human infants in certain respects, notably the size and position of the eyes. They trigger the same emotional response, and we want to nurture and protect them. This is why I don’t get bulletins about stopping the wholesale slaughter of iguanas in Ecuador - iguanas just aren’t cute. Identifying with a seal isn’t bad per se, as long as we remember our feelings don’t determine reality. The seal may be cuddly, but that doesn’t make it human.

This bulletin reflects a much bigger problem in our post-modern society: whatever we think or feel is real for us. If we feel the seal is suffering, it must really suffer like a person. This is most evident when religion is discussed: “That’s what you believe, and that may be true for you, but this is what’s true for me..” Also with art: “It doesn’t matter what other people think, the important thing is to express yourself and what you feel” Truth doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t come from inside you, it comes from outside. I have never heard an artist claim great art comes from inside, except as a sort of public relations ploy. Art must communicate truth, and truth is external. The artist must first internalize that truth, but it does not originate in him, and if no one gets his art it was probably based on a delusion and is worthless. Anyone capable of making great art must of necessity understand this, thus we have no great art. It is dying, along with poetry and music and philosophy, being replaced with meaningless abstraction. or sentimentalism.

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I’m sure you’re all groaning after reading this, “Ughh, Matt likes to kill baby seals..” If you think the seals should be spared, consider whether you are living consistently with your beliefs. Do you wear leather shoes? Leather belts? That cow spent it’s life in a stall only slightly bigger than itself, being pumped full of hormones, then was shot through the skull with a bolt-gun. Or perhaps these were used to electrocute the brain:This site is quite informative. Are cows somehow less significant than seals? Cows don’t eat their young like seals do, and while it’s true that we don’t need seal pelts, we don’t need leather either - there are plenty of substitutes. I respect people who think it is wrong to kill animals for human use if they are consistent in defending all animals and live according to their belief. Just getting whiny over the cute ones: a sign of a weak mind.

I just got home from the annual Ascension Day service, held this year at St. Johns Covina. The holiday is minor, and since the location rotates throughout the district attendance requires a map and varying amounts of driving. It is never popular. There is a mass choir, however, and I am a choir fanatic, so I go.

The performance was only average - just two songs: a hymn, and “The Lord Bless You and Keep You” by Peter. C. Lutkin, which is apparently such old hat that everyone ripped on the director for being lazy. I’d never heard it though, and played out material gets played out for a reason - it was quite pretty.

The preaching was far more interesting, though not for it’s content (Don’t remember the topic. Something about Jesus). As the pastor spoke, his sermon was translated into American Sign Language by a girl standing below the pulpit. I’ve seen people sign before, and even studied it closely, but I somehow missed the point - the central essence of the thing - until tonight.

This girl’s performance was mesmerizing. She was only average looking, with frizzy hair and the plain-faced look of a midwesterner (perhaps Utah), but I began to find her very attractive. I find people who sing attractive, and the experience was similar. I missed the sermon because I kept watching her and her hands - sometimes coming up under the sound and forming it the way a potter works at the wheel, sometimes floating on top like butterflies, or scarves on a line. Speech, with all it’s body and fullness, was shaped into an almost tangible thing under her hands. In the same way music creates a solid harmonic framework from nothing but air, upon which melodic ideas can rest and unfold, she was able to create substance through her movement. The kind of substance, provided by sound, that gives speech solidity and a felt presence - a substance that would otherwise be missing for the deaf, even if the sermon were available in print.

Both sign language and written English are inherently visual, so it is easy to think of signing as analogous to writing. Text is transparent: it is meant to translate from symbol to concept as quickly as possible. When formated properly, the medium almost disappears and it’s contents are directly available. I assumed ASL was the same - purely symbolic, with nothing in the form of the symbols apart from the ideas they signify.

This is not the case at all. ASL is much more like spoken English. It is not a transparent medium. The shapes of the signs are the sounds of speech, and they have substance inherent in their form, substance that can hinder or support the ideas being conveyed in the same way speech can be sonorous or ugly. I would have thought poetry impossible for the deaf (half of it would be missing - poetry must be read aloud, or at least read aloud in the mind), but it isn’t: the form of the sounds is in the shape of the signs.

I’ve just realized, thinking back, that it is most like dancing - like watching a ballet. Speaking with it must be like dancing yourself. Sign Language Girl, if you wanna go out some time, drop me a line…

I first heard this when my father used it as a sermon illustration.  It was written in the 1920’s and is thus one of the earliest texts on the power of positive thinking:

*To be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind.
*To talk health, happiness, and prosperity to every person you meet.
*To make all your friends feel that there is something worthwhile in them.
*To look at the sunny side of everything and make your optimism come true.
*To think only of the best, to work only for the best and to expect only the best.
*To be just as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your own.
*To forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future.
*To wear a cheerful expression at all times and give a smile to every living creature you meet.
*To give so much time to improving yourself that you have no time to criticize others.
*To be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear, and too happy to permit the presence of trouble.
*To think well of yourself and to proclaim this fact to the world, not in loud word, but in great deeds.
*To live in the faith that the whole world is on your side, so long as you are true to the best that is in you.

Self-help philosophy is endemic in the world of buisness and the book store, but it is visible throughout our culture and many subscribe in a vauge sort of way.  Conversely, I think most sensitive people would find this creed offensive, but why?  How can you argue with something so uplifting?

Some of these principles are excellent (we should always strive to make people feel loved and rejoice at their success), but others could only be followed through self-deception.  How shall I wear a cheerful expression at all times?  To do it I must shut my eyes, cover my ears, and smile at my own imaginings, because life is full of things that cannot be smiled at.  Should I smile at my co-worker who has her child killed and vacuumed out of her body, the holy image of God extracted like a foreign growth?  Or perhaps I should smile when I see His image sleeping under a bus bench, infested with lice and covered with open sores, because no one can be troubled to help? (This must be a holy land - it seems to consist entirely of priests and levites..)

Even worse is the injunction to think well of yourself.  If you know me, you know I am not a good man.

Self-help is, at it’s root, a false religion.  It sets out principles then promises salvation (happiness or self-realization) if they are followed.  And here is the lie:  It tells us we are capable of perfection, that even the world will be perfect if we believe, when fact we are hopelessly flawed and need to be saved from ourselves.  Suffering is entwined with this life so intimately that they cannot be seperated - the threads of it touch everything and smiling will not protect us.  Our only hope, after the example of Christ, is to pray for the strength we will never have on our own.

I’ve assumed leadership of my church’s highschool youth group, and tonight was the first meeting.  I planned a bible study and several games, opened the fellowship hall, got everything ready, and ended by playing an out-of-tune piano in the corner, waiting for people who never came.  I left dejected, but why?  My intention was to serve; I wasn’t there for my own benefit..

Character is revealed not through intention but through action, and I see now my motives were mixed - I was expecting a return on my effort, in the form of satisfaction or diversion or whatever, and was deprived of it.  Herein lies the essential difference between God’s love and our imitation of it:  Divine love gives expecting and receiving nothing.  Indeed, it both expects and receives death.  Our “love” stems from a corrupted nature and is inevitably polluted by selfish desire.  No matter how small the degree of pollution, it is tainted and cannot stand on it’s own.  We are fortunate He has given us His love to use instead.

hanges in our lives are often gradual, sometimes imperceptible - we seldom have a point of reference outside ourselves and outside the intimate details of our lives.  Given long enough its easy to end up in vastly different situations without noticing.  The realization, when it comes, is disconcerting - there was movement but no sense of motion.

I had such a realization today.  A production worker came to my office and asked me to print case labels (these identify finished product by lot number, expiration date, etc.)  He brought paperwork with him, but not what I needed, so I sent him to get the rest.  He left, and I noticed he was happy to get out of my office.  He had been fidgiting while talking, looking down.  It dawned on me that alot of our staff does the same, and that they seem to be scared of me.

I don’t think of myself as intimidating and so was confused, until I realized I’m in a position of authority.  I spend a good portion of the day dispatching orders like a God of the Peones, expecting to be obeyed, and quickly, or else helping cook up strategies to “improve effeciency” that, whatever they really do, will impact the lives of a hundred odd workers.

Why are these people doing what I tell them?  No one said, “This is Matt.  He is going to rule over you, you must obey him.”  Do they really want to be lead so badly as to willingly put themselves in my hands?  Why does it seem natural to lead them, when I am not often inclined to lead?  Is it because they are short?  I want to hug them and be like, “I’m not scary, really!!”, but it doesn’t seem appropriate.

I’ve been taking my job lightly, but I don’t think I can do that anymore.  Last week I was put in charge of monitoring the plant’s working conditions, making sure it is safe.  I didn’t consider what that involves.  The safety of a hundred people is not a light thing and I’ve been doing a fine job leading by example: climbing the pallet shelves like a monkey, sticking my head inside the machines, jumping off the loading dock, lifting without a back brace, etc etc.

I went biking after work and managed to further weird myself out.  Normally I bike up GMR then down Colby trail, but today I tried comming up the trail instead.  I got about 5 feet and had to stop and walk.  Since I was walking I was looking at the ground and the only bike tracks were mine.  I never see anyone either.  In a city of 58,000, I seem to be alone - a behavioral outlier if you will.  I was thinking about how the trail is really steep, and how John won’t go with me, and was wondering if I’m nuts to do this every other day.  Then I realized it must be none of you have tried it.  If you tried it you would want to go all the time too.

I want to get a helmet camera like they have on the television shows..

Finally, some art.  Done with multiple iterations of a couple filters.

Current mood: bouncy

Before reading, listen to this..

It’s not bad on the whole. It meanders some, and the harmony is a little odd, but that probably can’t be helped given the nature of the thing. Maybe half of it sounds like a real song.

I didn’t write the above per se, but extracted it from this fractal, carried through a few more iterations (I know some of you are giving up now, but I promise I won’t get into the math..):

I’ve heard attempts at this before, where the curves are mapped onto a scale, and while they were interesting as an alternate means of understanding the fractal (fractals are not inherently visual, they are simply a kind of equation), something was lacking musically. Of course this is assuming fractals are somehow musical - they intuitively seem that way to me because they share a particular kind of ordered variaton with music.

The salient feature of fractals and music is a theme repeated in different orientations and at different levels of depth or detail. For the fractal or the music to be aestheticaly interesting, several of these levels must be visible at the same time.

With a visual representation more than one level can be depicted by varying a single dimension - size/orientation - because we see things on a continuous spectrum with room for lots of fine detail. The attempts I have heard treat music similarly and vary pitch in relation to the fractal’s outline. Music, however, is limited to the discrete values of the scale, so there isn’t enough resolution when just pitch is used.

Music uses levels of organization that are qualitatively different. I see the next level after melody as harmonic movement, which operates measure to measure instead of note to note. After that would be large scale changes in the tonal center and modulation. I am here trying to seperate out the gross and fine detail of the fractal and represent it through two of those dimensions.

-The Process-

First I translated the overall shape of the fractal into a harmonic progression. The periphery of the fractal was sliced into 7 strips, divided vertically at regular intervals, and mapped as follows (based on approximate harmonic distance from the Tonic):

Strip 1 - Tonic (C in this case)
Strip 2 - Dominant (G)
Strip 3 - Sub-Dominant (F)
Strip 4 - Relative Minor (Am)
Strip 5 - Minor Dominant (Em)
Strip 6 - Minor Sub-Dominant (Dm)
Strip 7 - Diminished 7 (B dim)

The bottom half of each strip represented the basic chord while the top half was it’s first inversion. Next, a segment of the fractal was mapped, pixel by pixel, onto the previously determined harmonic structure as the melody. The available pool of notes was limited to the tones of the current chord and changed as the progression changed.

I think the result is pretty close to music, much closer than with other methods, but something is still missing (the inimitable mark left by the directed will of a composer?) Also the harmonic mapping can probably be improved. Using the absolute distance from the tonic permits too much weird harmonic movement. It might be better to map out a network of chordal relations through all the keys, then change based on the relative distance from the current chord..

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Ehhh.. my neck hurts and there is no one here to rub it, it’s very tragic..Been mulling this over at work, and I think the problems with the harmonic movement stem from using a Cartesian system of division when the fractal is radially constructed. It should either be mapped to polar coordinates, or else divided into consecutive segments, with the average change in angle between segments indicating degrees of relative movement on the chart from earlier. May try that later, too bad it’s so time consuming.

Current mood: contemplative

I just read an interesting study on faith and how our early experiences influence what we believe.  Three different criteria were evaluated:  Attendence at a religious school, church attendence, and regular bible study / devotions at home.

Unsuprisingly, parochial schooling has no impact on belief later in life.  More interesting is the very weak correlation between church attendance and faith.  This may reflect children just not understanding what church is about, or perhaps not relating it to their lives (I’m inclined to think the latter)?  Bible study and devotions at home were far and away the most influential.  This seems like common sense, but is important to think about anyway, especially if you have a family.  We never had devotions together when I was young and I feel like I missed out - it is something I want to do with my kids, should I manage to have some.

On an unrelated note,  go watch Stranger than Fiction.  Parts are uneven and it has a gratuitous sex scene, but otherwise it is far and away the best new movie I’ve seen recently - it even approaches greatness once in a while.  Any popular film that deals with issues of free will and mortality and personal sacrifice in a meaningful way should be supported.  Plus you get to see a reclusive, chain-smoking english author used as a metaphor for God; it’s very interesting..  and all this from Will Ferrell (the line between Comedy and Tragedy is perhaps thinner than I thought..)

Current mood: predatory

This is kind of interesting; saw it on a bulletin post.. seems accurate but it’s hard to properly judge one’s own character. The scores don’t bode well for my career in quality control..

My Personality

Neuroticism	39
Extraversion	38
Openness To Experience	93
Agreeableness	70
Conscientiousness	0

Test Yourself Compare Yourself View Full Report Find your soulmate / pysch twin

If you try it, post the results in a comment - it would be interesting to see.

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At work today I was thinking about mind / body duality, a-la Descartes, and it’s feasibility as an ontological theory (why? who knows..). It has fallen out of favor in academia, but remains a cornerstone of our culture’s understanding of person-hood.

The idea is that we are composed of two parts, a body and a soul, which are somehow bound together and able to interact (through the pineal gland, perhaps?) The soul is the real essence of the person; it persists after the body dies and is shuttled off to heaven or hell, or else sticks around for Halloween. Most people, in line with the theory, think the afterlife is a strictly spiritual existence. The soul in heaven is still soul only, like the angels it has form but no mass (it is often held that we become angels in heaven) - thus images of the deceased floating weightless amongst the clouds.

The bible, which must be our authoritative source on these matters, says very little. It never mentions the soul or spirit as something separate from the body. It does tell us, however, that our second life will be a physical one - we will be free from death and decay but incarnate none the less. We will not exist as mere spirits but will be given glorious new bodies.

The physical resurrection doesn’t rule out a mind / body duality, but it makes one less likely. The theory has two big attractions, however, and thus it lingers in the popular consciousness: it explains our interaction with the spiritual realm, and it de-fangs death by disposing of death’s darkest aspect (alliteration! this must be an important point!).

First death. Death is fearsome because when we die we cease to exist. If the soul is separate from the body then we stick around after the body fails - we don’t really die after all, we just change form a little. This seems un-biblical to me - if the soul and body are in fact separate, I think the soul must die along with the body until they are both reborn.

Our interaction with the spiritual is the more difficult problem. Mystical experiences are common and very real - it would make sense for us to be part spirit since we can perceive the spiritual. This isn’t necessarily the case, however, and even if it were, there is no reason to assume that spiritual part is something with separate and independent existence.

A simple argument can be advanced for why we need not be part spirit (though we may be) to experience the spiritual. Angels and demons have no material existence, yet they are able to manipulate the material world. They are even able to assume a physical appearance without having physical being. In the same way, there is no inherent contradiction in us being able to interact with the spiritual realm without existing in it.