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Another long boring blog that will make Robin complain...
I'm a Unitarian-Universalist. Strictly speaking, this means that I'm a member of a church that is part of the Unitarian Universalist Association, headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Since I live outside of the United States, my congregation is the Church of the Larger Fellowship, a "distributed" church which Robin likes to call my "internet cult".
Unitarian-Universalists are sort of infamous for being anti-creedal and non-dogmatic; in other words, we're not a Christian organization, and we don't require our members to hold to a particular set of beliefs. This causes a bit of confusion and consternation in the outside world. UUs get questions all the time like "are you a religion" and "well why do you even bother to be an organization?" Just because we're non-dogmatic doesn't mean that we don't hold to a set of common principles (though even these can be a bit controversial for those of us whose definition of "liberal religion" leans toward the "libertarian religion"). However, I think the very definition of "universalism" contains a paradox which I think is of consequence to people the world over, not just UUs.
The "Universalist" in "Unitarian-Universalist" comes from a church called the Universalist Church of America which became part of the UUA in the 1960's. The defining belief of the Universalists was that of "universal salvation", which said that all persons, having been created by God, must consequently be destined for heaven. (The "Unitarian", by the way, comes from another church, whose defining belief was that solution to the paradox of Jesus's mortality and divinity was that Jesus was not divine, but a mortal man. The Unitarians still exist in many parts of the world, have a creed, and consider themselves Christian, although other Christian churches often do not accept them as such.)
But concept of universal salvation is dependent on, and tied to, a much older form of universalism, which is a feature of virtually all Christian churches, as well as many other of the major religions of the present day, but by no means historically.
The earliest gods (that we know about) were local gods. They lived in a specific geographical area and were worshiped by the people of that area. If you left your hometown and traveled even a day or two by foot, you would be among people who worshiped another god. Your god might encourage you to conquer foreign lands and people, and might not want you to worship other gods, but that didn't mean that other gods did not exist, or that you had to force other people to give up their gods and take yours. Judaism comes out of this time period, and to this day most forms of Judaism do not do missionary work.
One of the first known serious breaks with this tradition was the Romans, who allowed their conquered people to keep their own gods, but enthusiastically associated foreign gods with their own: your grain goddess is the same as our grain goddess; your storm god is the same as our storm god; and so on. In other words, there is a "universal" storm god, and everyone's storm gods are images of that one. The group of Jews which became the first Christians lived within the Roman world and were familiar with this mentality. They, however, took it a step or two further. We are Christians, they reasoned, a band of people with a god. However, we are not Christians due to ancestry or geography, but by choice. Therefore all the "other" people out there are not simply irrelevant, but in fact "potential Christians", and need to be given the opportunity to worship our god.
This was a pretty new idea at that time - the idea that all the peoples of the world could, in theory, be measured by the same stick, and therefore - potentially - be held to the same moral standards. But in the last two millenia this idea has become pretty popular. Without this basic kernel of an idea the American Declaration of Independence could not declare that "all men are created equal" (a big-U Universalist claim if I ever heard one). The idea that all human beings on this earth might share equal rights - and, possibly, responsibilities - is nowadays espoused by people of a variety of religions, and people who consider themselves non-religous, also.
However, what things fit inside this "universal rights and responsiblities" box is a matter of great debate. It's one thing to claim that all human beings have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but do all human beings have a responsibility to protect the earth? love their neighbors? not murder? be vegetarian? abstain from sex outside of marriage?
There are relatively few people in the world today who don't hold some kind of universalist views. But absolute universalism is an impossible contradiction. There is no such thing as as a perfect "right to liberty", since it means that we must give one person the liberty to constrain the liberty of others. Absolute Universalism reaches its limits, also, when our acknowledgement of the "inherent worth and dignity of every person" prevents us from condemning them for trampling on others' worth and dignity.
For there are no universal "rights" without universal "responsibilities". We cannot insist on universal "liberty" without, in some way, taking it away. Belief in universal rights is moral imperialism. If that's the case, we might as well admit it, and be forthright about what morals we think are universal, and worth proselytizing about.
We may not all agree on what these morals are, but the discussion is worth having. And what is the right place to have this discussion? Church, of course. This is why (one of the reasons) I'm a UU.
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I'm actually going to blog about the subject of my studies today, sort of. A few weeks ago in one of my classes we had a discussion about the theft and trade of antiquities. Problems that particularly concern archaeologists include illicit digging at archaeological sites, and the sale of ancient artifacts on the art market. Listening to and reading archaeologists' views on the matter, it occurs to me that there are two related, but different concerns on the matter, which often get mixed up logically and emotionally. The first, and in my opinion, more legitimate concern is the problem of illicit digging. This has come up recently in the news with respect to digging on archaeological sites in Iraq, but happens virtually all over the world. For archaeologists (at least in the last hundred years or so), a great portion of the value of an artifact for research purposes comes from its "context" - that is, the exact location and circumstances surrounding an object. For example, few objects can be dated convincingly without context. From the shape of a stone arrowhead we can get a vague idea of the period of its manufacture, but a nearby bit of burnt bone can tell us (via radiocarbon dating) a lot more about its age, not to mention how it might have been used, what the people who used it might have eaten, etc. Archaeologists therefore dig sites very carefully, with close attention to detail and much recording of data. A stone arrowhead which appears on the art market, with vague claims as to its place of origin, is stripped of its useful context. Many archaeologists regard every instance of such artifacts to represent irretrievably lost context information. In this sense every undocumented destruction of an archaeological site is part of the same problem, whether through illicit digging or through bulldozing for other purposes (in which case even the artifacts are generally lost). The second problem is the problem of "ownership of heritage". This has come up in the news recently in articles about the Getty museum's method of buying ancient art, as well as the discussion between Germany and Turkey on the ownership of the Pergamon, as well as between Germany and Egypt over the bust of Queen Nefertiti. I call this the "whose toys are they, anyway?" problem. In this case there is no important data or research value at stake. It is simply a question of who can lay claim to certain pieces of history or prehistory. Some people make the claim that no artifact belongs in the hands of collectors; that the proper place for these artifacts are in museums, where they are well taken care of and available for display and research. This argument, at its root, claims that there IS a problem of lost research value when the artifacts are in "the wrong hands". I would argue that there are no automatically "right hands". There are many, many cases of museums storing artifacts under nonideal conditions, "losing" and accidentally destroying them. Even in less extreme cases, the vast majority of artifacts are not on view to the population at large, and even for researchers difficult to access. The problem of "illicit digging" is also less clear cut than it looks. The farther back you look in the history of archaeology, the more similar the techniques of supposedly professional "archaeologists" look to those of the "grave diggers". Even today there are big differences in the care taken when digging different sites. Nearly as bad are the extensive delays that come before publication of many archaeological digs - often as long as a decade or more. Sometimes the lead archaeologist on a dig dies before the results are published. Since you can't dig the same (part of a) site twice, it doesn't much matter how much care was taken in excavation if the context data is lost due to failure to publish.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the problems that archaeologists have with illicit digging and the antiquities trade are chiefly the result of a form of insecurity. In other words, "those are our toys! They're important to us! Nobody else has a right to have them. It should be ILLEGAL." But it's very difficult to legislate something like this, that goes beyond national boundaries to all over the world. No matter how difficult you make it, there will always be some super-rich collector who is willing to spend millions of dollars to buy an Egyptian mummy or Mayan stela. And of course, archaeologists, who need this stuff to do their research, and generally have very little money, get very frustrated. Great Britain has been one of the few countries to try a comprehensive program to approach the problem. They have put laws into place that require finders of ancient artifacts to first offer them to the National Heritage organization, who has the option of first purchase at "market value". They have also required developers to pay for archaeological and environmental assessment surveys of areas to be developed, with any significant finds subject to rescue excavation by professional archaeological firms. This approach has met with some success. But as you can imagine it is incredibly expensive. It is only possible in a good economy, where people see value from spending money in this way. Luckily in Great Britain the interest in archaeology and heritage is very high (expensive TV shows such as "Time Team" have significant followings). In countries where people have less interest in history and heritage, this would be much more difficult to support. Especially big problems arise in places like the Middle East, where local lack of interest in ancient heritage coincides with very high interest on the part of outsiders, who fund a lucrative "art" trade. In my opinion, much of this problem can be traced back to archaeologists themselves. As I mentioned, archaeologists and curators undermine their own claims to be the caretakers of heritage items when they fail to publish results and fail to take care of the artifacts they do have. Finally, archaeologists have a serious public relations problem. When you look at archaeological artifacts in a museum, you typically see them lined up in rows in glass cases. Each artifact may have a card with a place of origin, and possibly a date and (if you're lucky) a short description. The average member of the public has no grasp whatsoever of archaeological methods. From their perspective, there's not so much difference between the grave diggers and us. It's up to us to change their mind.
technorati tags:archaeology, heritage Blogged with Flock
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Attempt #1 a short blog (at reader request). Gluten is relatively new to the human diet, as wheat cultivation began only some 10,000 years ago.
Jury Is Still Out on Gluten, the Latest Dietary Villain - New York Times
It's true that we only domesticated wheat 10,000 years ago, but we've been eating it longer than that.
technorati tags:wheat, stupidscience Blogged with Flock
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A cite in the Economist lead to the Mercer 2007 World-wide Quality of Living Survey, which came out a couple of weeks ago. Munich, where I live, was ranked 8th in the survey. People often ask me how I like living in Munich (having lived here for 2 years now, having previously lived in Chicago, San Francisco, and Berlin), and especially how it compares to Berlin (the two cities have a bit of a rivalry in Germany). I tend to reply that it has its drawbacks, but it really can't be beat for quality of life. Munich has great weather, for example. It has four solid seasons, and they're pretty much storybook seasons. Winter is snowy, but not too cold, and has beautiful sunny days. Kids go sledding in the parks and teenagers and adults have easy access to great ski slopes. Spring is filled with green and flowering trees, and not too much rain. Summer is hot and sunny, but rarely dangerously hot and humid. Fall is long and warm. Munich also has great public services. When there's snow in the winter, the streets (and sidewalks!) are always clear by 7am. There's almost no litter. The public transportation is fantastic, anchored by a very extensive and quite new subway system. The parks are ubiquitous, huge, and beautiful. The bike paths are extensive, generally separated from cars, and well-maintained. Munich just smells good! Its buildings are attractive and colorful, and grafitti-free. The sidewalks are wide, and often separated from the streets by expanses of lawns with big trees. There are produce markets and pedestrian-only areas that actually work, and are packed with people daily. Guests tell me, "you live in a small town", but Munich is actually over a million people, and quite dense (you can get from one side to another, using public transit, in an hour). And yet, there's hardly any crime.
Munich has multiple symphonies, operas, and ballets, cinemas both pop and art-house (including an all-english one), musical venues both large and small, 17 public pools (9 indoor), a world-class soccer team, countless biergartens, 2 world-class public universities, and at least 5 large art museums. It has great street and city festivals at all times of year, crowned of course by the Oktoberfest, an event which I love (even though I don't drink beer).
Within 600 feet (about a block) of the front gate of my apartment (which, by the way, is extremely quiet) I have access to (off the top of my head): 6 bakery/cafes; 3 hairdressers; 3 take-out shops; 3 bars; 9 restaurants; 2 drinks/liquor stores; 2 tailors; 2 dry cleaners; a laundromat; a bicycle/sporting goods shop; a video rental place; a butcher; a produce shop; a drogerie (the household-goods side of a pharmacy); an apotheke (the pharmacist side of a pharmacy); a magazine shop; a boutique clothing sore; a fishing-goods shop; an antique shop; a pet supply store; a lamp store; a household appliances store; and many other things which I've forgotten at the moment. Within 1200 feet (about 2 blocks) are a grocery store, post office, subway station, large park. Within half a mile are a public swimming pool; large, daily organic produce market; theater; countless more restaurants, bakeries, hairdressers, pharmacies of both kinds, and 5 large grocery stores, including an all-organic one. The quality of living in Munich is fabulous. So whats its other side? Well, it is the bourgeoisie capital of the world. There's not a large amount of diversity (although it does have a sizeable immigrant population); pretty much everyone is quite well off. It's also very inward-looking; I am always ironically amused by a commercial for a local newspaper which runs in the cinemas here: many scenes of people having fun in well-known places in Munich, set to soothing music, followed by businessmen reading the newspaper in what looks like the sparkling cafeteria of a large business, with the tagline: "Learn about your world." Clearly, the world stops at the borders of Munich. Despite the great quality of living, the people of Munich are always complaining. The summer was too hot. The summer was too rainy. There's not enough snow. The students are going to starve, because university fees have gone up to $500/semester (yes that's right, a 5 and 2 zero's). The news that tests had shown the "fine dust" content of Munich's air to be above EU limits (although it was far below dangerous levels, and lower than most other large European cities) resulted in a week of public chest-beating, culminating in the newspaper headline, "Life here is hell!" I sometimes feel guilty about enjoying life so much in Munich. It's so easy to just not deal with the fact that so much of the rest of the world doesn't have the same easy life as "Muenchners" do. I don't think I could spend the rest of my life here in Munich. But if anybody needs to have some rest and relaxation, to take life just a little bit easy, recovering from ill health, a loss, or just a tough life-phase, Munich is definitely the place to be. Blogged with Flock
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Robin mentioned reading about a meta-study about weightloss programs, and I found an article about it in the scotsman. Basically, it says that diets are useless, and the only useful weight loss comes through more exercise. The article asks, why do we diet, when we just gain the wait back again? I'll tell you why we do it. The hint comes down in the bottom part of the article, where they are making recommendations. They say: "AIM to achieve a 600kcal deficit every day. That should equate to roughly a 1/2 lb (0.22kg) loss per week and should be achieved by additional exercise, rather than starvation." How do you achive a 600kcal deficit daily? I found a nice chart on nutristrategy. For a relatively big person (190 lbs - smaller people expend calories more slowly), 600kcal/day is equivalent to: - 60 min of jogging (4.4 mph) (4.4 miles)
- 105 min of brisk walking (4 mph) (7 miles)
- 52 min of bicycling (13 mph) (11.3 miles)
- 42 min of vigorous lap swimming
- 105 min of yoga
So you need to jog 1 hour per day, 7 days a week, in order to lose 1/2 lbs per week without dieting. If you keep up this jogging 365 days/year, without a break, you can lose 26 pounds. Well, a little less, because as you lose the weight, you'll be expending fewer calories per minute for the same exercise. Those of us mortals who can manage 40 minutes of jogging, 3 days a week, most weeks of the year, can look forward to losing about 7 pounds in a year. So, I wonder, why do we diet?
technorati tags:dieting, exercise Blogged with Flock
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Yesterday, in preparation for the deletion of over 3 years of spam backlog, I did a bit of a study of my spam. Mostly this was directed at the efficacy of my spam filter, but I looked a bit into overall nature of my spam also. I lamed out on the geek end of it and used searches in Thunderbird instead of doing any scripting, which probably made it take considerably longer. I have a bit over 25 thousand spams in my spam folder, the vast majority of which (all but about 20) date since my last purge in June 2004. This compares with about 2500 (one-tenth so many) non-spam emails in my inbox and archives (2 high-volume mailing lists not included, but minor mailing lists included). My system administrator has put quite a bit of attention over the years into combating spam, and in the last several years (at least since 2004) has been using the Bogofilter bayesian spam filter. For those not familiar with Bogofilter, you "teach" it to recognize spam by telling it which mail is spam. Based on a statistical analysis of the the difference between your spam and non-spam, it slowly takes over the spam-determining. You correct it when necessary, and theoretically over time the corrections become rarer and rarer. This has been deemed to be better than less flexible systems, because the spammers are adaptable, and over time, adjust the format and content of their emails to overcome those less flexible systems. One further note: I also use procmail to filter out a small number of mailing lists and vendor emails, and these bypass the Bogofilter. These add up to a relatively small number of emails, though. So, here are some of my results.
Spam Volume
Volume has risen significantly since mid-2004, although it is very irregular. There do not appear to be any seasonal patterns. The monthly average has gone from around 300 in late '04 to over 1000 in '06 and '07. The most significant growth was in 2005, where the volume grew by almost 50 emails per month on average; in the last year or so the growth has decreased to around 10 per month. In 2004, less than 60% of my incoming mail was spam. In the last year, around 90% was spam.
Addressee
The vast majority of my spam (at least 89%) is addressed to my oldest domain, parts-unknown.com, which is also the domain I use in my return address. My taska.org domain, which has a small web presence, and which I use when I need to give out my email address verbally, accounts for at least 6% of my spam. (These numbers are probably higher because I did not investigate whether mails to "undisclosed recipients" were included.) My system administrator has set up a special subsection of taska.org, "s.taska.org", for use in "high-spam-risk" situations, for example when we don't trust an unknown vendor not to sell our email addresses. Of the hundreds of address I have created this way, only one has slipped into the spam world: "orkut@s.taska.org", which has itself only been used for 5 spams. Some 81% of my spam is addressed directly to "taska". 7% is addressed to "webmaster", which points to me. The rest are mostly doing strange things with their To: lines.
My conclusion is that the following things put an email address at risk for spam: - Age and volume of use. Over time and use, there is an increasing chance that someone you have sent an email to will get a email-address-collecting spam-virus.
- Web exposure. If your domain has a web presence, and your email ID is short or guessable (let alone if you put your email address out on a public website), you will get more spam.
Things like putting your email into vendors' webforms seem to have less effect. ("Pseudospam", when you "accidentally" get signed up for email you don't want from vendors you've actually dealt with, is another story, which I'll discuss later.)
Efficacy of Bogofilter
Bogofilter has definitely improved over the years. It went from catching about 75% of my spam in 2004 to catching more than 90% in the last year. In the last year it also "caught" a small number of non-spam emails, incorrectly identifying them as spam. However, it may actually just be that Bogofilter is smarter than me, as we will see:
Bogofilter assigns every email a "bogosity" score between 0 and 1. After some experimentation, our bogofilter has settled down to defining email with bogosity less than 0.45 to be "Ham", 0.99 and up as "Spam", and everything inbetween as "Unsure". In our system, bogofilter only files away the "Spam" emails, automatically; "Unsure" and "ham" get sent to my Inbox. After tossing the "missed" spams into my "bogofilter teaching" folder, I typically sort my non-spam, non-list email into "Personal" (from friends and familyl) and "Vendor" (from people I do business with). Over the past few years, 3% of my mail has been personal, 5% has been from vendors, and over 90% has been spam. In 2006, 72% of my personal email was correctly identified by bogofilter as "ham". 28% was marked "unsure", a total of 122 emails (no personal emails were incorrectly marked as spam). Bogofilter did just as well with my spam. 91% was marked correctly. 9% was marked "unsure" (a total of 1224 emails), and only one was marked "ham".
Bogofilter has a much harder time with my "vendor" mail. Only 36% was marked as "ham"; 62% was marked "unsure", and 2% (12 emails) as spam.
The highest-bogosity "non-spam" mail has consitently been from vendors (like Yahoo, and Lands End), who signed me up for "opt-out" mailing lists without making that clear to me. In fact, all of the very "high bogosity" non-spam I have received falls into this category. Only once, in the very early days, did Bogofilter ever designate a "real" personal email as spam. (It was a party invite from someone I didn't know very well.) The only high-bogosity vendor mail that I wouldn't want to get lost seems to be from linked-in (Bogofilter seems to have a grudge against them). This has inspired me to go through my highest-bogosity non-spam email every few months to weed out the unwanted pseudospam (which luckily usually has a working unsubscribe method) and the consistently high-bogosity, but wanted, vendors (which I can procmail filter). Pseudospam, in general, is highly annoying, but I find that the vast majority of pseudospammers (my most common ones are online versions of paper catalogs and hotels) do have functional opt-out systems. Least likely to have opt-out systems are tiny vendors like the proprietors one small beach hotel I visited, who probably use their Outlook addressbook to send out their regular mails. Annoying, but not annoying enough for me to send them an email demanding to be removed from their list :). Over all, I'm very happy with the success of Bogofilter. I would probably be happy if Bogofilter tucked away all of my spams over 0.90 bogosity, instead of 0.99 (this would reduce the false-negatives by about 500 a year, with less than a dozen, not very important, additional false positives), but it's a pretty tiny issue.
Spam Topics
I did a small study of these. They're tough to study because spammers do their best to avoid keywords (it's too easy to filter by them). Some popular keywords: Sex: 1302 hits
Job: 1222 hits
Stock: 785 hits
In the 400-500 range: account; drug; loan Alright, I think that's plenty! It probably took me about 10 hours to do the analysis, and I have other things to do. I hope my system administrator is pleased with the removal of 25,000 emails from my mailbox.
technorati tags:bogofilter, spam analysis Blogged with Flock
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| 2007-03-29 18:43 |
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Oh right, I have a BLOG.... Robin is an apneist. I'm not so much, although I have been known once in awhile to spend time underwater without a tank. In the past few weeks I have gone on a couple of freediving (Wikipedia) trips with Robin (to Tenerife and to Konstanz), and while I have been sitting on the surface waiting for him, I have been doing some thinking about the pastime. Upon hearing that Robin (or I) freedives, a surprising number of people remark, "Sounds scary! I don't think I could do that." And indeed, it is a much less popular sport than, say, SCUBA diving (which is also scary for a lot of people). Having done both, I find freediving far less scary. For me, there's something innately terrifying about trusting my life to a set of tubes and tanks and weights and and balloons tied to my back, most of which I am probably using for the first time, and all of which I just assembled in haste while being jostled about by a bunch of other people on a boat. Not only is there the threat of quick and scary death due to equipment malfunction, but also the option of slow and painful death due to miscalculation of course, current, or bottom time. Not to mention the sheer embarrassment of bopping around on the surface like a cork when everyone else has disappeared below, or crawling around on the bottom damaging coral underneath the group, due to misweighting. Now that I've shown myself to be terror-prone, I should say that I actually do enjoy SCUBA diving, although I have found that I vastly prefer it in warm waters, where the lack of a wetsuit makes weighting issues much simpler (and where dive boat operators are more hands-on helping with gear, because of the larger percentage of bozos like me). (I have other issues with wetsuits in general, but they don't fit into this post.) But my point is, there seem to be a lot more people willing to learn a whole lot of technical stuff and put a bunch of gear on their back in order to dive under the water for 10-40 minutes, than people who are willing to hold their breath while they dive under for a minute or two. So many fewer, in fact, that immediately after people tell us how scary freediving is, they follow it up with "Why do you do it?" Now, I don't remember ever having been asked this about SCUBA, but it happens all the time with freediving. In fact, people have come up with a variety of reasons for freediving, and in fact most people seem to freedive for one of the following reasons: - To photograph fish. It's easier to get close to fish when they're not being scared by the bubbles coming out of your regulator (NOTE: it is not recommended ever to hold your breath while SCUBA diving).
- To hunt fish with a spear or spear gun. It is illegal in many places to hunt fish while SCUBA diving (and some people think it is easier freediving, for the same reason it is easier to photograph fish).
- To challenge yourself. There are many freedivers whose primary focus is to go down deeper and to stay down longer than they ever have before. There are even professional freedivers who compete internationally for fame and prize money, vying to set new records in a variety of sub-disciplines. These people must have a very high level of physical fitness, to be sure, but they are also competing on another front: knowing how far to push themselves. There is, in fact, a sub-discipline called "no limits", in which the diver drops down holding on to a weight, and comes back up attached to a balloon. To do well in this activity, you don't really need lots of muscles, but you do need a very good heart and lungs, and a whole lot of guts.
But there is a much simpler reason to become an apneist: it's good for you. Mind, body, and soul. Humans, like all mammals, are actually pre-wired to do apnea diving. When cool water is splashed on our faces, our brains automatically prepare our bodies for a dive: our heart rate slows, our circulation changes to give our brain and vital organs a larger share of oxygen, and we pad our chest with blood to protect our lungs under high water pressure. Yup, even you have an innate ability to hold your breath and dive under water. This ability is actually very trainable. For example, I can hold my breath under water for about a minute, but Herbert Nitsch can do it for over 9 minutes. Studies on Jacques Mayol, the first freediver to reach 100 meters, found that his heart rate slowed to 20 beats per minute while he was diving. Sebastian Murat, infamous for diving on empty lungs (he breathes out before he dives), has been measured at 10 beats per minute at 150 meters. This is true for dolphins, also - when Jacques Mayol started diving with dolphins, he found that they normally only hung out around 20 meters or so, and when they started following him deeper, they actually had to train to catch up with him. I can hear you saying, sure, Taska, this is all fine for macho hunks and crazy dolphin men, but why is it good for me? Well, go ahead and try it. Take a few deep breaths (no hyperventilating!) and then just hold your breath for as long as you can. Just this once, I'll let you time it. You can look at a watch or count in your head). How long can you hold your breath? I can do a minute, but 30 seconds is fine. How long did those 30 seconds seem, in comparison to the rest of your day? Breathe normally for a minute, and then try again. This time, just listen and look around you. How many things do you see or hear in your environment that you've never noticed before? Now imagine doing this underwater, surrounded by fish and corals, and think about how much more you will see. How much longer those 30 seconds will be. How much more life you can experience, simply... not breathing. Why is this? Breath holding takes focus. When we're holding our breath, there's no room for senseless distractions. Stressing over tomorrow's test or interview, running tonight's shopping list around in circles in your head, wondering if that package will arrive today... it all takes oxygen. All that multitasking, all that activity in the brain falls away, and the inactivity becomes the activity. Not the inactivity of slouching on the couch in front of the TV after a long day (no eating!), but the inactivity of activating your senses while dropping all the unnecessary brain and muscle activity. You don't have to be completely still. Try the "apnea walk": stand in front of your front door. Prepare with some deep breaths and then hold your breath. Walk down the street as far as you can before breathing again. In the meantime, notice everything around you. When you have to breath again, walk slowly back to your door, breathing regular, slow breaths. Prepare, and then try again. Can you get farther? Here's a hint: running won't help you much. It tends to take up more oxygen than it gives you in distance. Freediving is the same way. Learning to freedive is an exercise in relaxation. Apnea is a form of meditation. It's also an exercise in controlling your reactions to the world. Let's say you're on your apnea walk, calmly heading for your goal of the next street corner. You're ten feet away when your little sister jumps in front of you and says BOO! Do you explode and start yelling at her (not that you have the breath)? Or do you walk around her and keep heading for your goal? The same story applies if your goal is the water surface, 10 feet above you, and the sudden distraction is an annoyed moray eel whose territory you just accidentally invaded. The next time that a colleague or manager at work seriously annoys you, imagine that they're your little sister, you're holding your breath, and your goal is 10 feet away. (Or imagine them as an annoyed moray 10 feet underwater....) Apnea is good for you because it lowers your heart rate, helps you learn to relax and focus, and makes every minute last longer. And freediving lets you visit many of the same spots that SCUBA divers visit, without all the stress and expense. You can actually do it without any equipment at all, but a nice mask, snorkel, and fins will be about $150 (more basic ones cost far less). That amount would barely get you a low-end SCUBA regulator. A lot of current apneists spend a lot of breath obsessing over their deepest dive or longest breath hold, to the point that they will happily dive in deep, dark, cold water with only a rope and a dive watch as their guide. I think that really undermines the meditative aspect of apnea. It's nice to push your limits, but it's more fun to do that by finding out how much you can experience on just one breath. Throw away the watch, slow down, relax, look, listen - you will breathe more easily, knowing that you know how NOT to breathe.
technorati tags:apnea, freediving Blogged with Flock
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Robin wanted me to upload some photos to flickr, so I took the easy way out and made some of my favorite photo torture victim, Duco. We've taught him a number of tricks like sit, stay, lie down, fetch, and pattycake. He's taught us a number of tricks like dinner, out, cuddle, and play.
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I'm back in Munich after a wild week in Chicago (wild in that it was a whirlwind of cleaning and repairing and renting my apartment). The United States was warm and sunny, just as confident and optimistic as always, and seems to be getting along just fine without me. Before I left Robin and I were watching a very interesting series of videos about economics. They were released by Milton Friedman in the early 80's as a PBS series called "Free to Choose". There is also a published book version available on Amazon. Now when it comes to social issues, as my friends know, I'm rather liberal, but I find myself becoming more and more of what might be called an economic conservative. Surprisingly, this doesn't seem that contradictory at all. One of the interesting concepts Mr. Friedman presents in his videos is that of the negative income tax. It works as follows. Currently, in the US, when you pay taxes, you can take certain "deductions". Roughly, this means that you don't have to pay income tax on money expended for certain purposes (for example, mortgage interest). Even if you don't have any expenses which show up on the list of "accepted deductions", you can still take a "standard deduction". Basically, this is because we believe that everyone needs a certain amount of money to live, and so we shouldn't have to pay taxes on that amount of money. Currently the standard deduction is, for example, $5150 for a single taxpayer, and $10,300 for a married couple filing jointly (I wonder how many places in the US you can live on that....). Meanwhile, for similar reasons, we also have a minimum wage - for the last 8 years, this has been $5.15/hour. At 40 working hours/week and 50 working weeks/year, this comes out to $10,300. In other words, at the moment, if you work a full-time job, paying minimum wage, with two weeks of unpaid vacation (or sick days), and support a non-working spouse, you will earn $10,300 and not pay any taxes. But what if you get pneumonia and are sick three weeks instead of two? Or what if you can't find a full-time job, and have to take a job making 30 hours/week? You'd just have to survive on less. And if you lost your job and couldn't find another one, you'd get unemployment for 6 months, but then you'd be out of luck. If you have children, you could get on welfare, but otherwise you'd just just have to survive on savings, if you had any, and otherwise charity. The US has no General Assistance. The Negative Income Tax is a way of dealing with this problem. Let's imagine that as a society, we could make the decision that a single needs at least $10,000/year to live. Let's imagine that we made the additional decision that every dependent in the household costs an additional $5,000/year to live. (NOTE: these numbers are completely arbitrary. I'm not saying that $10,000 a year is actually enough to live on.) So, for starters, we'd make this the standard deduction. So if I'm a single parent with two children, making $50,000 a year, my deduction would be $20,000, and so I'd only pay taxes on the remaining $30,000. So far this is basically similar to the current deduction system. But let's say I lose my job, and can't find another. After 6 months, I'm making $0. Now what? Under the current system, I would be able to apply for welfare (limited by a number of restrictions and requirements). But the Negative Income Tax would deal with this more simply. It would say, while I'm not making any money, I should pay a Negative Income Tax - that is, the government would pay ME the amount of money that it costs to live - by our deduction calculations, $20,000. The really nice thing about this system is that means we could do away with a number of other systems - the welfare system, the minimum wage, and others, all very expensive to administer and police. Instead, the administration of the Negative Income Tax would be a relatively simple extension of the current tax procedures. It would just be a slight change in the way the IRS calculates the taxes, plus the ability to send out monthly checks (the IRS already sends out many adjustment checks each year, after the tax returns are in), and a form to fill out at the local post office if you have no income at all. There is a certain amount of policing to be done, but it all falls under the heading of tax fraud, which the IRS already handles in great quantity every year.
A system like this would be simple, but wouldn't it discourage people from working? This is a valid concern. In fact, any tax system like this needs to address three basic principles:
1) The system should help people who are not making enough to live.
2) The system should always encourage people to take work. 3) The more money you make, the less the system should help you. I did some playing with numbers and came up with a surprisingly simple formula which fulfills these goals: a simple standard deduction and a flat tax rate. For example, let's say that the standard deduction is $10,000 and the tax rate is 50%. So, if I'm a single person making $0, the state will give me $10,000. If next year I get a part-time job making $5000, the state will still be helping me out, but not as much - it will give me $7500, so my total income will be $1250. If I get a full-time job making $20,000, I come out even - the state doesn't take anything, or give me anything. Here's how it looks: Job Pays --> I Receive: $0 --> $10,000 $5000 --> $12,500 $20,000 --> $20,000 $30,000 --> $25,000 $50,000 --> $35,000 $100,000 --> $60,000 $200,000 --> $110,000 $500,000 --> $260,000 $1,000,000 --> $510,000 Visually:
And here's a chart of effective tax rate, based on salary:
The system is crude, but it works out surprisingly well - especially considering that I made up the original $10k out of my head (although I just checked, and it is very close to the official 2006 federal poverty threshold for the contiguous 48 states - $9,800). OK, that's enough math for one post. I still want to consider this more; some questions which come to mind are: - How to deal with married couples and dependents? - How to deal with working minors? - What about geographical variations in cost of living?
- How much money would this actually make the Federal Government?
I have some possible answers for these, but I'll deal with them in another post. P.S. Feel free to comment on why I'm a complete idiot and this won't work at all....
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So everyone seems to be talking these days about the study that shows "magic mushrooms cause spiritual experiences". Frankly, when I heard about this, I had no idea what it meant, so I looked it up. The study was done by researchers at Johns Hopkins University and published in the journal Psychopharmacology. In the study abstract I found several pertinent points:
- The participants were specifically chosen as "hallucinogen-naive" and "reporting regular participation in religious or spiritual activities."
- They were given either Psilocybin, the main ingredient in "magic mushrooms", or methylphenidate, the main ingredient in Ritalin (not a hallucinogenic drug).
- They "completed questionnaires assessing drug effects and mystical experience immediately after and 2 months after sessions."
- Psilocybin "increased measures of mystical experience."
- In the questionnaire after two months, the participants "rated the psilocybin experience as having substantial personal meaning and spiritual significance and attributed to the experience sustained positive changes in attitudes and behavior consistent with changes rated by community observers."
Okay, let's think about this a little bit. You take a bunch of people who are participants in "religious or spiritual activities", that is, in general "spiritually"-inclined. Specifically, these are people who believe that something is or may exist outside of our ordinary everyday life. You take these people, and you give them a hallucinogen (which they have never experienced before). A hallucinogen, by definition, will give them sensations which they do not experience in daily life. A spiritual person would likely classify this as a "mystical experience". For a spiritual person, a mystical experience would naturally be very significant in their lives. So, are we trying to prove:
- ...that Psilocybin causes hallucinations in many people?
- ...that people who consider themselves spiritual understand hallucinations as "mystical experiences"?
- ...that a "mystical experience" tends to be very significant to a spiritual person and may make them feel better about their lives?
Which one of these hypotheses is newsworthy? The researchers conclude as follows: "When administered under supportive conditions [!?], psilocybin occasioned experiences similar to spontaneously occurring mystical experiences. The ability to occasion such experiences prospectively will allow rigorous scientific investigations of their causes and consequences." The fact that they can cause the experiences to happen will allow them to investigate the causes of the experiences? Isn't it completely obvious how the experience was caused, if you caused it? The LA Times article on the subject reports the lead researcher as going a bit further: "The interplay of brain chemicals sparked by psilocybin could explain the biology underlying spiritual experiences.
The process 'could be the basis of ethics and morality,' he said." Now I'm really scratching my head....
technorati tags:psilocybin, mushrooms, drugs, study, medicine Blogged with Flock
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I'm trying to write a post about the World Cup, but it needs more work, so in the meantime I'll write something about the Tour. (People are probably going to think I'm some kind of sports fanatic.) It seems like everyone's been moaning about the tour, after a doping scandal wiped out all of the big favorites for the General Classification. I think it's great to have a wide-open field, after all of these years of the usual suspects getting the top two or three spots. The only rider I really miss from last year's top 5 is Alexandre Vinokourov. His team (he moved to Astana-Würth, formerly known as Liberty Seguros-Würth, from T-Mobile this year) had to drop out of the Tour because they lost so many riders to the doping scandal. He came in 5th place last year after winning a very dramatic battle with Levi Leipheimer in the very last stage. So instead I'm following: Floyd Landis - an American time-trial/climbing specialist on the Phonak team. He is in second place on this Tour in spite of mechanical problems and a hip which is nearly non-existant due to avascular necrosis. This condition produces pain similar to the osteoarthritis which has led my mother to replace one hip, and then the other. Having watched her pain and disability, it is incredible to me that he manages to continue to not only race but be a dominant force in this Tour. David Zabriskie - an American time-trial specialist on the CSC team. He won the first stage in last year's Tour and is in 8th place on the General Classification at the moment. He has a blog on his website where he sometimes posts one-question interviews which he conducts with his fellow riders in the peloton. Michael Rasmussen - a Danish climbing specialist on the Rabobank team. He dominated the mountains points from Stage 8 to the end of the Tour last year. He also has very good style. He's in 84th place at the moment. Fabian Wegmann - a German climbing specialist on the Gerolsteiner team. He did a very impressive attack on Stage 7 last year in which he won all of the points and was 17 minutes ahead of the peleton for awhile. He's in 99th place at the moment (they're starting the mountain stages now). Jens Voigt - a German generalist on the CSC team. A very strong, consistent rider, and funny too. He's in the 117th place at the moment. My favorite team is Team CSC, which is suffering at the moment due to a couple of crashes, not to mention the loss of their leader Ivan Basso to the doping scandal. I enjoy their team-oriented style. The tour this year has been fun, with a host of new faces getting attention - well, not actually new faces, as many of them have been in the Tour for years, working hard, but overshadowed by a few dominant players. I've been enjoying following it on cyclingnews, and occasionally on the television. The upcoming mountain stages should be very interesting.
technorati tags:tourdefrance, cycling, sports Blogged with Flock
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In my continuing Web 2.0 experimentation I've added some photos to Flickr. These are mostly photos from Halle (Saale), a very pretty town outside of Leipzig where Robin and I attended a business conference.
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So Robin set up a blog for me, so that I can test Flock, and have some fun while I am no longer an employee and not yet a student. At present I'm just a slacker living in Munich, which is a great place to be if you're a non-destitute slacker, especially in summer. I'm currently involved in sorting out my photos, so I'll be uploading some of those, and maybe having some thoughts about the pros and cons of living in Germany vs. the USA, ancient near eastern civilizations, customer service, that kind of stuff. Stay tuned.
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