Swordtreaty!

I've been sick the last couple of days, and so I've been playing a lot of Dwarf Fortress, which explains the lack of blogging (oops...). I mentioned the entertainment value of the RNG (random number generator-- it's what decides the random factors in video games) in Dwarf Fortress; today, I thought I would give you some more examples, in my current fortress.

I finally downloaded the Lazy Newb Pack (LNP), a very useful thing that allows me to turn off aquifers and invaders and contains tools like DFHack, which allows me to designate whole veins to mine and see what my moody dwarves need. It also comes with several graphics packs, which are neat, although I was fine with the ASCII art of the base game. So, having gotten these useful things, I started a new fortress (my last one, Splashbronze, fell to invaders). This is the saga (so far) of Swordtreaty.

First things first, I turned off aquifers and invaders. I wanted to get some practice with long term things without having to worry about a siege of 97 goblins, battle toads (that the goblins were riding), and trolls, like I had in my last game. Also, I don't yet know how to deal with aquifers. I also set my world to be a bit smaller and have less history and savagery, but more minerals-- really, I wanted a fairly easy game. I found a site that had everything I wanted-- deep soil, a river, shallow metals, deep metals, lots of trees-- and picked one of the ready-made embark teams that came with the LNP. It was a good site, nice cliffs so I could have a protected entrance (even without invaders I wanted to practice building a better defense system), easy access to the river so I could build a well easily, lots of trees, and when I started excavating for my fortress, I almost immediately hit copper and aluminum.

Then things started getting annoying. As I am excavating the very first part of my fortress, I get a notification that my hunter cancelled hunt: dangerous terrain. A little while later I get a notification that he has been missing for a week. Sure enough, he fell into the river and died. When a dwarf dies, if his body is not properly buried, he will haunt the fortress. I knew it would be some time before I could get coffins made and a burial chamber built, so I expected that I would end up with a ghost. What I should have expected is that no one-- not my hunters, not my fishers, not my woodcutters, not any of the dwarves out collecting materials from outside-- would be able to find the body. The Ghostly Hunter claimed the first coffin I set up, but since I can't retrieve his partial skeleton (the only part of him I can find), I'm stuck with a ghost. He's not being too troublesome-- since he was one of the first seven, not many of the dwarves in the fortress know who he is, so he doesn't torment them much. At this point I kind of like him.

So I get my fortress mined out, and I've struck huge veins of native gold, as well. I'm excited-- I have a lot of trees, so once I get a wood furnace and a smelter, I can start making things out of these valuable metals! ... and then I find out that none of my dwarves can operate the wood furnace. I appoint a manager and look at the workshop-- a dwarf must have at least novice level furnace operation to use the workshop. That means that I can't just toggle the ability on in a bored dwarf. I don't know why that one workshop has that issue; all of the others I can just give a random dwarf the ability to use it and they will. Apparently not so with the wood furnace. So I resign myself to waiting. Surely one of my migrants, at some point, will have the proper skill.

My fortress now has a population of 225-- with a population cap in the game of 200, so I get 2 or 3 migrants a year-- and not a SINGLE dwarf can use my wood furnace. And I have found a huge amount of copper, gold, and galena, which can be smelted down into lead and silver. So I am mining the depths in the hopes of either finding a magma vein (and then maybe figuring out how to make a magma forge), or breaching the underground cavern and having a few of my dwarves die off from various beasties, so I can get more migrants. At this point I would mine out adamantine just for the demons to come and kill off some of my population. Damned useless dwarves.

One thing I tend to forget about is making clothing. I've rarely had a fortress last long enough for this to be a problem-- clothing will eventually degrade and rot, but I've not had this problem because I tend to fall to invaders fairly quickly-- but I forgot about babies growing into children. Babies don't need clothing, but children do. And I wasn't paying attention to the children-- they can't be assigned any sort of work, so I don't really notice them. Until they start throwing tantrums, that is.

Dwarves have moods. Good things, like eating a fine meal or dining in a nice dining room or admiring their own bed, will give them a happy moodlet, while bad things, like being caught in the rain or being annoyed by flies or the death of a loved one, will give them a bad moodlet. So will being unclothed, it turns out. So when one of my children threw a tantrum I went and looked at their mood-- they had been embarrassed by being uncovered lately, and were upset at having no shirt. Oops! So I built a whole bunch of clothier's workshops and started making clothing. Only there is no option to make shirts! I cannot find a way to make shirts! So I made some dresses and robes and trousers and socks and shoes... and my children are still tantruming, running around naked as far as I can tell. The best part is that I have had two go stark raving mad, which means they strip off all their clothes (...) and then eventually die of dehydration or starve to death. And it seems that my adult dwarves are stockpiling clothing now, keeping it in their rooms. Dammit, dwarves! Won't somebody please think of the children?!

I do rather like that I have invasions turned off, because I've got a pretty strong military anyway, so when there is a thief, I send like twenty dwarves after him. I had an ambush once-- six goblins, and then another six. Oh no! What ever will I do? So I sent four squads out-- thats forty dwarves. The ambush didn't last very long. I'd have sent all of my squads, but there were merchants at the depot so I left two squads there to defend, in case a goblin got away.

The other fun thing I've got that I've never had to deal with before is nobles. The dwarven civilization decided to make Swordtreaty a barony, so I appointed a dwarf to baron. This meant that he needed a much bigger and nicer bedroom, some armor stands and weapon racks and cabinets and chests, and his own office and dining room, and a tomb. Recently he has been promoted to count, which meant he needed even nicer things, but fortunately the stuff I gave him was already good enough. Unfortunately, he and my mayor have the option of making mandates and demands. And both are demanding, you guessed it, things made of metal! Dammit, dwarves, I need to have a furnace operator before I can make shit out of metal! Their mandates, however, are always entertaining. Make three crutches! Make two more crutches! Don't export any crutches! Make three more crutches! Apparently my mayor is really worries about inuries. My baron, on the other hand, was obsessed with slabs. I didn't even know what a slab was before he demanded that I not export any; he apparently realized that there were not any slabs to not sell, so he then demanded that I make some. I think I may put them in his room, since he is so fond of them. The mayor, having gotten eight or nine crutches for himself, moved onto demanding bucklers, and then moved onto large cut gems... at which point a different dwarf got elected mayor. I wonder if the dwarves saw that as corruption?

I can easily see, having played a bit more, how games like Boatmurdered and Bravemule have been woven into the hilarious stories they are. I think I might have to, on my next go round, chronicle the whole thing with a bit more accuracy. I might even try to go back and chronicle this one. I rather like Swordtreaty, with its ghostly hunter, useless ores, naked children, and demanding nobles.

Another week, another SSA event...

Today we had another SSA meeting, and this time we asked Dr. Shorey to speak. Dr. Shorey is probably my favorite professor I have had thus far at Mines. He teaches one of the core classes, Earth and Environmental systems, and so most students have had him at one point or another. Apparently they had another professor do it one year, and there was enough of a public outcry that Shorey returned. His class is extremely easy-- not because of the subject matter, but because of the way he teaches. He has pre-written objectives, from which all the test questions will be pulled, so you know what you need to take notes on and what you need to study. And he has a podcast of every subject he covers in the class, in case you have to miss for some reason. But mostly, he's awesome because he is very, very enthusiastic.

When we started talking about this group, someone mentioned that they had been talking to him about being a faculty advisor, and I was a little surprised-- in one of his podcasts (specifically the one on evolution) he states that he is a christian. Apparently that is out of date; he was very keen to help us get started, and he has connections and all kinds of useful things to offer.

Today he spoke about religion. He began by declaring himself an agnostic secular humanist, which he then defined: agnostic because he doesn't know about afterlife or the supernatural, secular because if he doesn't know, he's not going to make decisions based upon those things, and humanist because to him, the most important thing is the survival and well-being of the human race. I rather like that definition, as well as that label. He then spoke about what he called the elephant in the room-- religion. Apparently the word comes from two cells, "re," meaning back, and "ligio," meaning tied to. So religion, based on this, is something that ties us back. To what? Dr. Shorey stated that he believes it ties us back to each other, to a belief that we are all connected and important in some way.

He spoke then about myths-- he is fond of the hindu myth regarding the face of glory, and fond of myths in general, and in that, I agree. He says that he certainly does not believe them to be true, but that there is worth in them anyway. Then he talked about the anthropic principle a bit, and I think he was a little too soft on the idea of the strong anthropic principle. (The weak anthropic principle states that of course the universe is "fine-tuned" for life; if it wasn't, we wouldn't be here to wonder about it. The strong anthropic principle involves the idea that we are necessary for the universe to exist or continue existing, which I find rather silly.)

Then he talked about whether science and religion were compatible, and here is where I disagree with him. He didn't come out and say it, but he appeared to support the idea of Non-Overlapping Magisteria, or NOMA. What NOMA states is that science answers one kind of quesiton, and religion another, and they therefore can coexist as long as they don't try to deal with the other's subject matter. I disagree. For one, religion seems to step into science's domain, if you want to think of them as separate, all the time. Fundamentalists especially want to step in and say that science is wrong, but really, all of them do it. They believe prayer can heal, and they believe miracles can break the laws of physics, and they want to define where life begins for their own morality's sake. And yet when science tries to step into their domain-- that's intolerance!

It goes deeper than that-- what IS the domain of religion, exactly? It used to be that it spoke on everything from the causes of the weather to dietary restrictions. Now we know better-- that's science's domain now. Religion can talk about an afterlife... sure. Science cannot yet say whether there is any point to that. I think the presence of a soul-- a non-physical, animating thing which makes us who we are-- is absolutely a scientific question, and that it doesn't look terribly good for the supernatural claims at this point. Does religion dictate morality? HELL no. As they say, it takes religion to make a good man do evil things. Should science dictate morality? It's got a much better angle on it, as far as I am concerned.

But at the core, the problem is that the very basis of all science and the basis of all religion are at odds, as far as I can tell. Religion asks that you believe, without proof-- the more you believe, the "better" you are. Science asks that you put every hypothesis to the test. The less you believe, without evidence, the better a scientist you are. And the religious reliance on faith, on believing in spite of evidence, is, I think, harmful to the human race. It teaches people NOT to hold their ideas up to examination. It teaches people that "I don't know" means "god did it," rather than "let's find out."

In any case, I very strongly disagree with the idea of NOMA. Other than that, though, today's meeting went very well, and Dr. Shorey filmed his talk, so hopefully I'll be able to share it soon. For the moment, I need to head to bed, it's been a long day and I've a long weekend ahead of me.

Off Their Rockers

Old people are awesome.

I've been saying it for years-- I love old people. I think they're adorable, and they get to have a lot of fun I couldn't get away with, because no one's going to say anything about it to a little old lady. And Betty White's new show, Off Their Rockers, is a celebration of that fact.

When I was young, my mom had this poem hanging in our downstairs bathroom:

WHEN I AM AN OLD WOMAN I SHALL WEAR PURPLE
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other people's gardens
And learn to spit

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

I always liked that. It's the basis for the Red Hat Society, if you've ever seen any of the groups of Red Hat Ladies out and about. I don't like them quite as much as the poem-- I don't think they really get into the spirit of it. But Betty White? Yeah, she gets it. She just turned 90 years old and she poses in pictures with young men in speedos. And now she has this show, where a bunch of old people do crazy stuff and prank young people.

The first thing that happens in the show is a great example. An old man stops a young woman in a mall, and asks if she can take his picture. She agrees, and he tells her that he wants a running shot, so he's going to go around the corner and get some momentum. He disappears, and when he comes running back around... he's naked. He's smiling ear to ear and she actually does take his picture before he is tackled by security, at which point the girl is giggling to herself, not sure what she ought to be doing but extremely amused.

The whole show is like that. Most everything they do gets the same reaction-- a slow-dawning realization of "what the hell just happened?" followed by giggles. A little old man asks for help sending a text message to a lady friend. A young woman agrees. He asks her to send "You bring the wine, I'll bring the whips and handcuffs! Tonight's the night!" and when he leaves, she gets on her phone and tells her friend about the most incredible thing that just happened to her. An old man hobbles up with a cane, pulls a skateboard out of his bag, and proceeds to show up the little teens messing around in the area. Then he puts it away and hobbles off. I'm surprised no one got their phones out to take pictures, but all the spectators were grinning from ear to ear, unsure what they just saw, but delighted by it all the same.

It reminds me of Improv Everywhere, which you should look up if you've not heard of them. They're absolutely delightful. They do things like choreographed musical numbers in mall food courts, with everyone from the janitor to a girl working behind the counter in on it. Sometimes they'll even get spectators involved, like the time a guy got everyone on the subway to help him propose to his girlfriend. It leaves people delighted, because it's fun, and because it's totally unexpected.

So it is with the little old man coming into the grocery store and bowling with produce, or the guy whose motorized wheelchair tried to run away, or the little old ladies dressed as nuns who invite people to a party with a wet t-shirt contest, or, really, most everything that I have seen on Betty White's show. It's delightful. And it's on hulu-- go watch it!

Some great ways to be non-productive

Today I got myself addicted to two new games. Well, re-addicted to one, newly addicted to another. The new one is this, a simple but very entertaining game where you can explore variation by mutation in flowers. Or, to put it more simply, where you can breed a flower to look how you want it to. There's a button that says "evolve-o-matic" where it will randomly select which traits get passed on. It's really neat to just let it run, and see what you get. Given that I've been arguing with creationists (and others who merely "doubt" evolution) recently, it amused me. Creationists always seem to make the mistake of thinking that evolution is a random proceess, and that's one of the big hangups they have-- they don't believe that randomness can 'create' the diversity we see in life. But evolution is not random-- there are environmental pressures that determine what traits get selected for. It is, in fact, far LESS of a random process than the whims of a divine creator. Anyway, this simple little simulator-- that IS random. There are no environmental pressures selecting for any particular traits, and so it will come up with different results every time you run it. If, however, you step in, you can play the role of those environmental pressures-- in a dry environment, plants with smaller blossoms do better, because they do not have the resources to sustain larger blooms, so you can select for smaller flowers, and in that way direct the evolution of the result. I thought it was neat, anyway.

The other one is a viciously addictive, not so little, surprisingly complex game called Dwarf Fortress. It's been in development for about a decade, and is coded entirely by I think two people. It has no graphics to speak of-- ASCII characters make up everything in the game, with a lowercase 'c' representing a cat and an uppercase 'E' representing an elephant, and various symbols creating the landscape and structures-- but it has a fascinatingly complicated AI.

The point of the game, in Fortress mode, is to build, defend, maintain, and turn a profit with a fortress. You begin with seven dwarves and a cart full of resources. You have to carve out a fortress, build farms, workshops, living quarters, and defenses. Several times a year merchants will arrive, so you can trade goods you have produced for supplies you need, and several times a year a new batch of migrants will arrive, the number depending on how well your fortress is doing. You will also have an increasing number of attacks, as years go on, from kobold thieves to armies of goblins, from wild animals in the outside world to cave spiders in the depths, and if you delve too deeply you can awake the forces of Hell. Your dwarves can starve or go mad from lack of alcohol, they can drown or burn in lava, they can fall down wells or walk into traps. There are a seemingly infinite number of ways to lose, and there is no way to win. As anyone who plays the game will tell you, "losing is fun!"

But the real fun, for me, is in the dwarves themselves. They each have names, relationships, likes and dislikes, a randomly generated (and surprisingly detailed) physical appearance, things they are good at and things they are not so good at, and they will adopt pets, form new friendships and relationships and, much to the player's frustration, choose which tasks they want to do. You cannot control them. You can toggle the skills that are active-- if, say, your miner won't stop carrying rocks, you can turn off the rock hauling skill, and he will stop doing that. But you cannot tell them what to do. You can create tasks, but they will decide which to do when. The miners will carve out everything you have designated to carve, but they will do so in odd patterns. If you pay attention to what they do, when given options, you can get a surprisingly clear picture of their personalities. I had one who adopted every cat in the fortress. If you set them to engraving, some will have favorite subjects-- I've seen dwarves obsessed with cheese, for example. For a simple little game, these guys are incredibly interesting.

If you're going to play it, however, I would suggest you bookmark the wiki and reference it frequently. Losing may be fun, but it helps to have a headstart. It is, as I said, a surprisingly complex game.

Also:

This picture makes me very happy.

Intolerance for Tolerance

I've been arguing on facebook a lot lately. But I really didn't think that posting this was going to start one:

I mean, really, that doesn't seem like something that would start an argument. I even had a Christian friend weigh in on it:

"If I were truely religious I would look at it from the terms of sacraficing yourself for your child. I would still take the drug regardless of religious beliefs. Take the drug, save the child. Besides in the end if there truely is God (or whomever/whatever is important in your religion) then he or she may understand and save you anyways. Your child will have a life and will be able to live. You will still live but just a different life as far as you're aware. People aren't always smart. One thing the church does teach and that is that we are all flawed in some way. We can do good things but we are also sinners. If taking the drug in order to save the child is a sin then I guess I would be a sinner. Whomever wrote the comment below is not a good person in my mind. There are some good Christians and some bad Christians."

But then a 'friend' of mine steps in, and has this to say: 

"Well to be fair, if you set someone up like that, paint them into a corner KNOWING what they believe in advance..."

I don't see how it's a set up, and thus, we start arguing. My point is that someone stating that they would not only sacrifice their child's life for their beliefs, but that they consider it a moral action to do so, is horrifying. His point seems to be that any criticism of another's beliefs is intolerance, and therefore not okay.

Between this friend and my mom, I seem to be doomed to be forever defending myself against extreme tolerance. Yes, everyone should have the right to believe however they please, and in an ideal world, their beliefs wouldn't have any impact on me. However, some people insist on making decisions for others based on their own personal beliefs-- I do not see how accepting this behavior is in line with the idea that people should be allowed to believe whatever they want. "Believe whatever you want... but it offends my belief if you want to get an abortion." Not okay. 

I'm honestly not sure why I haven't unfriended this guy. He annoys the crap out of me at least 90% of the time. 

You earned it.

So I've been watching Celebrity Apprentice this season, because there were a lot of cool people that were on it-- George Takei, Paul from American Chopper, Lisa Lampanelli, and, of course, Penn Jillette. It's been a really interesting show to watch. Mostly I've hated every person on the women's side except Lisa, and have been annoyed at their cattiness, and mostly I've loved the men, and been pleased at their professionalism. Of course, more of them men have real careers-- many of the women were singers I've never heard of or on TV shows like Real Housewives. I would expect the people who actually work for a living to be a bit more successful in a business-oriented show.

Anyway, last night, they fired Penn. I am annoyed by this, and not only becaue I like the guy and think he was one of the best (if not THE best) contestants.

The task was to create an in-store display for the Macy's flagship store to launch Mr. Trump's new cologne, Success. They had a certain amount of space to work with and about a day to do this, and one of the things they had to do was to come up with a slogan. Slogans are, of course, part of the alchemy that is successful marketing; it's hard to measure exactly what they do, but a good one will help sell more stuff. It should be short, simple, and memorable. And it should ideally both say something positive about the product and invoke positive feelings in the consumer. Marketing, like everything in the nebulous "science" of economics, is a sort of voodoo, and very hard to quantify. So the judging of which slogan (and which display in general) really depended on how the Macy's executives felt about it. However, I think that their feeling about this one was wrong; I think they made the wrong choice, and that if they make decisions like this all the time, it's no wonder they are not a store I prefer to shop at.

One team used a quote from Donald Trump, always a good call, sucking up to the boss-- except that he was not the one making the decision, but whatever. They went with "Always Trust Your Instincts." ... I don't see how that is a particularly good slogan. If I am out at Macy's around Christmas timee, looking for a gift for a man, and I see/remember a display that says "Always Trust Your Instincts", I am more likely to take that as advice, and go get the first thing I thought of, rather than the cologne in question. (I doubt that the majority of people who will be buying the cologne from Macy's are men; men who buy their own cologne shop in better stores.) Also, their display looked like a set piece from a school play-- obviously made by hand.

The team Penn was on put together a much better display, with a beautiful backlit photo and just a lot more professionalism all around. It was the kind of display that I would stop and look at, if I were shopping. And their slogan, I thought, was better: "You earned it." That says to me 'be proud of your success, treat yourself to something nice, buy this cologne.' And I think it is a much better slogan if you are buying a gift-- I got you this nice cologne, because hey, you earned it.

The Macy's executives hated it. They thought it was pompous, and not at all what their clients were looking for. And that tells me that Macy's will always be a low end department store, and will never attract the kind of clientele that spend more money.

Perhaps it is a little "pompous." But to succeed, you have to have a bit of an ego. If you are buying a cologne that has the Trump name on it and is called "Success," you're probably a little pompous yourself. You feel like you DO deserve it. Also? Huge cosmetics company L'Oreal uses the slogan "Because you're worth it." It's been pretty damned successful for them.

So Trump fired Penn, because he came up with the slogan the executives hated-- after admitting that he himself actually like it. And I get that decision, even if I don't like it. But the Macy's executives... all I have to say to them is "You're wrong, and you're stupid for thinking that."

Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Iske!

The wedding was today. It went really, really well. In fact, the whole day did.

We got up early, to a freshly cooked pancake breakfast, so that we could go get Jamie's nails done at 9:30. This was a somewhat unpleasant experience, as we had been out drinking last night and had slept on couches, and I woke up with the first hangover headache I've ever had. Fortunately I had water and aspirin and coffee and breakfast, so the effects faded quickly.

The nail place had been recommended by her hair stylist, and I have to say, she was very right to send us there. Jamie got a full set of real acryllic nails (as opposed to the fiberglass ones), french manicured, dried and ready to go... in twenty minutes. That's ridiculous. And they only cost $25. If I ever have an occasion to have fake nails put on, I'm going there. During this process Jamie and I finalized the timeline for the reception so we could give it to the DJ, something that had been stressing Jamie out a lot. I think she really appreciated that we could work on it while she was getting her nails done-- multitasking for the win!

Next up was the hair appointment, at 11:30. Because I was with Jamie and her mother was not, I was deputized to chronicle the event. So naturally I took pictures of every single step of the fairly elaborate hair she had. Her camera died partway through, so I took more than half of them on my phone. Gotta love smartphones-- I have with me at all times a camera good enough to take fairly good pictures, and I can instantly upload them or email them if I so desire. The hair ended up both beautiful and practically immobilized-- which is exactly what you want, in a hair style that needs to last for many hours, through various forms of stress. We had worried a bit about the fact that the dress had to go on over her head, but it ended up being fine.

Then it was back to the house, where I got myself ready while Jamie visited with family she hadn't seen in years. It wasn't long before we had to head to the church, though. We got there very early, before anyone except the pastor (more on him later), so we had a lot of down time. I painted my nails-- all of the bridesmaids had the same nail polish-- and Jamie tried not to stress over the fact that her makeup artist was apparently lost, as she had called to say they were close and then not arrived. She did finally get there, though, and once she had gotten herself dressed, she did an amazing job on Jamie's makeup. I went off to do my own makeup, and got myself all ready to go. By the time Jamie was done with her makeup we were down to half an hour before the ceremony, so I ordered her to go pee before we had to put her in the dress. In the end the timing was almost perfect-- she got into the dress about five minutes before the ceremony was due to start. It took some time because it had a corset back, which made me very grateful I've had practice on real corsets, as I am good at lacing people in fairly quickly.

The ceremony went very well. Jamie's father was able to walk her down the aisle, without even a cane. The music was lovely, and everyone looked wonderful. Brett and Jamie could have spoken louder during the vows, and Jamie got the giggles at one point, but it was good. Except for the pastor.

I hate to break up a report of such a wonderful day with this, but I can't not rant a little. Pastor Thompson is a misogynistic asshat. Jamie likes him, so I didn't say anything to her, but damn, did the man get on my nerves. It began during yesterday's rehearsal. Jamie's sister, Joey, was late. She is often late, so much so that it's become a joke among her friends and family. We were contemplating finding some way to help her get better about it, and Pastor Thompson offered a suggestion: find her a man. He said it as a sort-of joke, and if it had been the only one, I'd have figured that I just didn't like his sense of humor. But he said several other things that made me twitch as well, and I came away feeling like he was incredibly sexist. Also homophobic, which Jamie says is true, but that is neither here nor there.

Then there was today's service. The entirety of his message can be summed up thus: God has a plan for you, God made women to serve men, and marriage is more about Jesus than each other. Each of those three points make me twitch, but the first and the third I had expected. The second one, not so much. He read from Genesis about how woman was made from Adam's rib to give Adam a helper, he talked about how a wife's duty is to serve her husband, and the entire time I had to stand there and smile because the damned ceremony was being videotaped and my face would be visible. I was extremely grateful for the car ride to the reception, where I could rant to my heart's content with George and Bob and not worry about offending any of the family or friends-- this was the main pastor at Jamie's lifeling church, I have a feeling a lot of them love him. FSM only knows why.

Right after the ceremony, of course, we went to sign the marriage certificate. I got to be Jamie's witness; that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. And then there were the pictures. Jamie had told her mom she could only have twenty minutes for pictures, which was good. Even so it was quite an experience. Between six and twelve people taking pictures in addition to Jamie's mom, so every pose had to last long enough for everyone to get a good shot. And of course there were a lot of poses. Jamie by herself (fix the train of the dress, it must be arranged perfectly!), Jamie with Brett, Jamie with her parents (fix the train, she moved!), Jamie with her grandpa, Jamie with her whole family, Jamie and Brett with her parents, Jamie with her bridesmaids (the train!), Jamie with the groomsmen (here, put your feet under the train), Jamie and Brett with the groomsmen, Jamie and Brett with his parents, Jamie and Brett with his family, Brett with the groomsmen (Jamie, you can go-- wait! We need a picture of the train!)...

Finally we managed to get Jamie back to the library we had turned into a dressing room to attempt to bustle her dress. Holy crap, it needs to come with instructions. There are two layers to bustle, one which has satin ribbons to tie and one which has strips of lace, but you have to match up the champagne colored strings with each other and the white ones with each other, and I felt very silly that I had to turn the task over to her mom because I had no idea. We did get it eventually, which meant it was time for the reception.

Upon arriving at the reception Jamie and Brett were showered with bubbles-- rather than rice or whatever else people like to use-- and then there is a buffet, build your own burritos. Then comes the toast. All of Brett's groomsmen said something, largely because they wanted to embarrass each other by making each other speak. I put a bit more thought into my own toast, saying a few things about and to Brett and Jamie, and offering this blessing:

May your mornings bring joy and your evenings bring peace.
May your troubles grow few as your blessings increase.
May the saddest day of your future
Be no worse than the happiest day of your past.
May your hands be forever clasped in friendship
And your hearts joined forever in love.
Your lives are very special,
God has touched you in many ways.
May his blessings rest upon you
And fill all your coming days.

Yes, I know, it talks about God's blessings, and I'm an atheist. But Jamie is not, nor are many of the people who were there, so it seemed appropriate. It went over very well. And that was the last big thing-- we had to do the first dance, and we had to do the bouquet toss, and the cake, but none of those were stressful. Mostly, it was fun.

I caught the bouquet. I'm not really sure why-- I just saw that it was going to be easy to catch, and so I jumped up and snagged it out of the air, without really thinking about it. There is a fantastic picture of it, where it looks like it was staged because I struck such a dancer pose in the air. And I danced, a lot. I got Bob to do the first couple's dance with me, and then I did the Electric Slide and the Chicken Dance and the Time Warp and the YMCA, and then I dragged Bob back onto the dancefloor for Rascal Flatts's "God Bless the Broke Road" because I was a little tipsy and I love that song.

All in all, it was a really good day. Surprisingly enough, this is the first time I have done a wedding and NOT had it strengthen my desire to not have one myself. In fact, I started thinking about how it could be kind of nice. Even with all the stressing and the sexist pastor and everything else, Jamie was just so happy all day. It was beautiful.

Wedding Blues

So, my best friend is getting married tomorrow. She has been super stressed (about things mostly unrelated to the wedding), and yesterday she sent me a text saying that she didn't want to do it anymore, it just wasn't worth all the stress. I've been saying that for years.

This is one of the things where, in spite of my dislike for feminists, I tend to get a little touchy. As young girls, we are taught to wish we were princesses, wish that our handsome prince will come and rescue us from whatever, wish that we will fall in love and get married and live happily ever after. As a result, most girls grow up thinking that finding a boyfriend is extremely important, sometimes more important than anything else. We're willing to break our parents rules and skip our homework and classes to be with the boy we have decided is The One, even if we're not yet old enough to drive. Happily Ever After is the goal; a handsome, wonderful, loving, doting husband and children.

I cannot think of a time in my life that I have wanted children, and the older I get, the more annoying I find the assumption that I am going to change my mind some day. Mothers are the most irritating. They will complain about how awful pregnancy is, with the aches and pains and cravings and nausea and everything else, they will complain about their little brat misbehaving or not listening or getting up too early in the morning or demanding things they can't afford... and when I ask why it is that women always say pregnancy is magical and motherhood is the best thing ever, they immediately forget everything they were complaining about and say that of course, it's a miracle, they love it! I think there's some sort of evolutionary brainwashing going on; the species would not survive if mothers did not feel this way and want more.

But more than that, the pressure to get married annoys me. At least I can understand the evolutionary reasons for women wanting children. Marriage is a social construct that I think perpetuates mostly because no one bothers to question the assumption that it is the ultimate goal. I had a baffling conversation a couple of years ago, with an ex of mine who was, at the time, still pining for me. I told him that I was perfectly happy being single, that I was content to focus on my schooling and my career. Do you know what his reply was? "Well, you'll change your mind when you meet the right guy." (I told this story to a fabulous woman, Connie Willis, and her reply amuses me to this day. She looked at me very seriously and said "No jury in the world would convict you." Priceless.)

What does that mean, anyway? That when I meet the right guy I'll forget all about the plans I have for my life? Or that I will realize that I was miserable until I met him? Either way, what the fuck?

I have met a guy that I might call the "right" one, by the way. I am not writing this because I am single and bitter about it. I got my life in order, and on a whim I went on a dating site (they're good for my ego; I'm attractive enough that I get a lot of messages), and I got a message from an intelligent, interesting young man. We've been dating for almost a year and a half now. I have not realized that I was miserable before, and I have certainly not abandoned my plans. He loves the fact that I am as ambitious as he is; if or schooling puts us on opposite sides of the country, we'll miss each other, but neither of us would ask the other to put our relationship ahead of our careers. I do intend to be with him for probably the rest of my life. I might even marry him-- largely for the tax benefits and such that come from it.

And then I look at my best friend, the girl who's getting married tomorrow. She is happy. She has spent a lot of her life trying to find a man to marry and she does want to have children. And that's fine-- she is happy. As long as people don't assume that I want that, I have no problem with it. But she is stressed to the point of getting herself sick over the wedding. If I have a wedding, I want it to be fun. Period. Maybe we'll rent out the local museum and get married under the baleful eye sockets of the T. Rex skeleton they have in the lobby. Maybe I'll wear a lab coat with my wedding dress. Maybe we'll have a TARDIS replica in the background and invite guests to come in costume. Maybe I'll have bridesmen instead of bridesmaids. Maybe I'll have bridesmaids but put them in lab coats, too. Maybe we'll serve liquid nitrogen ice cream.

But if I ever feel like planning a wedding is going to stress me out, I'm going to call it off, and just sign the papers at the court house. It's not worth it.

Ask An Atheist Day! (Part 2)

Today was Ask An Atheist day, as I mentioned in yesterday's post. It began, for me, last night, when I posted about it on facebook and invited people to ask me anything. What an interesting experience!

I had a few people ask sincere, curious questions, which are nice, and often lead to good conversations. In fact, most of the questions I was asked led to good conversations, actually. I did have some flippant questions-- my favorite being a fellow atheist asking, grinning from ear to ear, how we explain the banana. If you've not heard it, there's a very silly creationist argument that says the banana is so perfectly designed for human consumption that it must have had a creator. Which it does-- man. The banana, in its original form, is nigh inedible; through careful, directed breeding, it became the sweet, seedless fruit we know today.

But mostly I had some very good conversations, starting in a chatroom last night with a friend asking me sincerely about my beliefs. I don't recall all of the questions, but they were good ones, and it was a good opportunity to hone my answers for the challenges that came later.

When I posted to facebook, I began getting questions almost immediately, but the interesting ones started this morning. It turns out one of my facebook friends, who has a PhD in physics, is a young earth creationist. He believes that evolution would violate the second law of thermodynamics, and thus is impossible. He also believes that the laws of physics do not allow the earth or the universe to be as old as scientists claim. He posted in great detail, and so I took time to address each of his points, doing my best to remain polite (even though I kind of wanted to scream). In the end, he thanked me for my replies, and bowed out of the discussion-- I count that as a win.

Then, of course, there was the table today. I got there at eleven to begin setting up, though we were scheduled to begin at noon. We were already collecting people's contact information and answering questions by 11:45, and while there was some down time, we had a very successful day. Got the word out about the group, had a lot of people thank us for starting it, even had one guy take a picture of us and post it on reddit-- go upvote us!

Then, of course, there were the conversations, many of them with Christians. I was in class when a bible study group came by and offered printed out bible verses, which makes me a little sad, that would have been fun. But I was there when two Catholics came by a little later. The girl began by asking "Who created you?" in a somewhat mocking tone, so I gave her a flippant answer-- my parents. She kept asking "Who created them?" so I kept answering "Their parents" until someone stepped in and started talking with her about the origins of life. At this point her companion had a question of his own, so I stopped paying attention to her for a bit, but she eventually asked about saints whose bodies were supposedly perfectly preserved (we looked them up and found that they were not, and that there were perfectly legitimate reasons for the imperfect preservation that was present), that she claimed had been examined by "atheist scientists" who found no scientific reason, which meant it had to be a miracle.

At this point her companion and I were talking about martyrs. His question was simply "What about all the people who have died for God? Why would they do that if God wasn't real?" I told him that it made perfect sense for them to die for something if they believed in it, to which he replied that they wouldn't believe in it that much if it were fake. So I asked him about people who had died for things he didn't believe in... he didn't have a reply to that, and after that, the conversation was much less confrontational, and we started talking about the meaning of life, and other such philosophical quandaries. By the time he left, he seemed very thoughtful. They were both very friendly-- everyone I spoke to today was.

All in all, it was a very good day, and I am very glad that we did this.

Ask An Atheist Day!

Tomorrow (4/19) is National Ask An Atheist Day. There are a lot of misunderstandings about what atheists are, what they believe, and why, and this event is an attempt to correct that.

To use a personal example, here are some quotes from a conversation I have been having recently on facebook:

• ...while Atheism/Naturalism cannot fully fit the description of a religion (which is a word of considerable vagueness) it does rise to the level of a Quasi-religious worldview, postulating answers to the questions: Is there a God? How should we live? Is there life after death? What is our place in the universe? How are we related to other creatures? And the answers it gives are not based on conclusive reasoning, but require a faith in that particular worldview because reason is itself a matter of faith.
• The only response to ... Atheism would be a meaningless madness, deadening apathy, and suicidal insanity. 
• Now, if I was less consistent in my Atheism, I could try to sneak in some things which would allow for more sanity, joy, and hope in life. I could claim that Reason was reliable in spite of the lack of support and even contradictions to the consequences of starting from a materialist philosophy. I could claim that relationships matter. I could borrow ideas of order and objective truth and infuse them into my claims about the universe. All inconsistent with my Atheism, but who cares?
• If there is no God then evidence suggests that I have no reason to believe in reason, morality, free will, the veracity of my experiences or anything else.
• I know you say you wonder at the universe... But I live in a wonder-filled one.
• "The believer is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and development in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle." It seems obvious to me which are the free thinkers.

... the whole conversation has been incredibly frustrating, starting with his ideas of what an atheist really is (in spite of him not being an atheist himself). It frustrates me that everyone has their own idea of what it means when I say that I'm an atheist... and that they often do not listen when I correct them. Theists-- that is, people who are not atheists-- have some really odd ideas about what it means to be an atheist, and some even stranger ones about what it implies. 

In any case, for the entirety of the day, I'll answer any questions I am asked-- preferably about atheism, but silly questions are fun, too. We're setting up a table in the student center on campus tomorrow, hopefully we'll get a lot of interest, answer some good questions, start some good conversations.

And actually, as long as this blog post is up, I'll answer questions in the comments, too. :)

Explosions!

Today I attended a physics colloquium; every Tuesday they bring in someone to talk about physics research or a physics topic. Today it was "Recreating Astrophysical Explosions with Combustible Gases in the Laboratory."

Stars are giant fusion reactors, but they mostly convert hydrogen into helium. The heavier elements come from when a star 'dies' and explodes, in an x-ray burst, a nova, or a supernova. The particular system that today's talk was looking at was accretion driven explosions, which happen in binary star systems. Often, in a binary star system, one star will collapse into a neutron star or a white dwarf-- a highly massive, but very small star-- and the other will burn itself out and expand becoming a red giant. When this happens, material from the now much larger star will be attracted to the smaller one, and will be captured by this. As this happens, the small star, due to its compact state, will no longer act as an ideal gas-- when more matter is added to an ideal gas, temperature will rise and volume will increase, which will then cool it back down. In a degenerate star-- that is, the white dwarf or neutron star-- pressure will increase instead of volume. As more mass is added to the star, the pressure rises, increasing the temperature, which then increases pressure again, which then increases temperature; rather than the star cooling itself, it creates a runaway reaction. In this environment, temperatures are such that nuclear reactions compound, and heavier elements are created.

When a nuclear reaction like this happens, many, many transformations happen; an element is created, and before it can decay back down to a more stable state, it will be bombarded again and instead raised up to a new, heavier element.

It is impossible to create this sort of cascading reaction in a lab; the temperatures and pressures required are only present in these super-compact degenerate stars. Creating something like this on Earth would be catastrophic. What we can do, and what our laboratories are trying to do, is create the individual reactions in the cascade, one at a time.

Here is where the talk got really interesting; as much fun as the theory is, it is fascinating to see how these things are actually done.

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where our speaker was from, has an enormously complex setup, and I cannot speak about it in great detail because, to my dismay, I don't understand a lot of what it all does. I'll tell what I can, though. They have a cyclotron that produces radioactive ions, which they then send to a massive tower to accelerate them. The principle is fairly simple. They have a huge electromagnet, the top of which they set to positive. The negatively charged ions accelerate upwards towards it. At the top there is a carbon stripper foil; when the ions pass through it, the density and energy are increased, so they can no longer sustain as many electrons. Thus they are turned from negatively charged ions to positively charged ones. Now positive, the ions accelerate bock down the tower, to be directed into the appropriate mechanism from there-- depending on what sort of ions they are, the facility can direct them to a number of places. Today's talk focused on the Nitrogen 17 to Neon 18 reaction, so that is the only set up that we heard about.

In order to create the reaction they wished to measure, they needed three things: Nitrogen 17, Hydrogen, and a lot of energy. Above I discussed briefly the setup to create the high-energy beam of Nitrogen 17; now I'll talk a bit about the Hydrogen. The ORNL facility uses an extremely low pressure gas chamber, with multiple pumps set up to keep the pressure low. The pumps have to create a constant pressure for the gas window, as it is called, so that their measurements will be consistent. The benefit of having these pumps, the speaker told us, was that it doesn't take a whole lot of time to get the machines up and running; this is aided further by the fact that they are being used to lower pressure, rather than raise it.

So now we have a beam at high energy being focused into a target, of the right elements. This will produce the reactions desired-- though not very often. For every reaction produced, you need as many as 10^12 particles to pass through the window. Now we need to filter out the non-reactions so that we can measure the ones we want to look at. This particular reaction emits a gamma ray along with producing the Neon 18; unfortunately, gamma rays do not have a lot of momentum, so the reactions are barely deflected. However, they are at different enough velocities to be filtered that way. Directly after the gas window in the setup is a recoil separator. This device has two functions: it will re-focus the slightly deflected atoms back to where we want them, and it will only allow atoms traveling at a specific velocity to pass through it. The first is accomplished by magnetic fields that are vertical-- perpendicular to the path of the beam-- and the second by electric fields that are horizontal. The parts of the beam we don't want to look at can be deflected away, and only the one we do want passes through.

After that there is a dipole magnet that deflects the beam at an angle, measuring the momentum of the atoms. Now that we have both velocity and momentum, we can measure the mass, to be sure that we have what we wanted to create. There is also a detector that measures energy loss, which will yield the atomic number, after some calculations.

So! We have created a reaction. Now, what can we learn from it? After plotting the data, we can see the resonance strength-- the bell curve will either have a very steep slope, or a more gentle one, and that will show how sensitive the resonance is. (I'm not going to try to explain resonance at the moment; it has to do with quantum energy states, and I do not feel confident enough in my understanding to say much about it.) The resonance strength, it turns out, is directly proportional to the reaction rate-- and that is a very useful thing to know. This particular reaction, for example, has a half life of about 2 hours. This is long enough that we can measure it, with satellites, and based on those measurements, we can figure out what the star was like before it went nova.

If we can get accurate data for every one of the reactions we can produce in a lab, we can extrapolate the more high energy ones from the data. When we have a thorough understanding of every reaction that takes place in a star's explosion, we can create a more accurate model of a star's life. And as I have mentioned before, models are extremely useful things.

Exam day!

I have never suffered from test anxiety. Sure, I'll get a little nervous when I know it's an important test, or when I know it's a subject I'm a little shaky on. But never full on panic-attack, forgetting-things-in-the-exam-room anxiety. I don't really understand it, and so it was always hard for me to give people advice on tests, back when I was tutoring.

Here's what I do, for what it's worth:

1. Do my homework. It sounds obvious, right? Do the homework. All of it. See, while you might think that homework is assigned as busywork (I am constantly astounded by the number of people I meet who think so), I assure you, the teacher would rather not have to grade it. It is assigned for two reasons: to pad your grade a bit and to make you practice the work. Teachers are aware that people freak out over tests, and they really do want to do everything they can to help you get a better grade. This is particularly for classes where a lot of the work is calculations-- maths and sciences, mostly. If you do a hundred problems of the same kind, you will hardly have to think about it when you see one of them on the test. And if you make sure you're doing them right, you're less likely to make a silly error on the test. So yeah, do the homework, whether or not the teacher collects it. Trust me, it helps.

2. Take notes. In a class where you are not crunching numbers, there's a good chance you're being asked to remember a lot of stuff. Fun fact: the process of rephrasing what the teacher says in order to write it down in your notes helps you remember. Still having trouble? Take your hand-written notes and type them up. The more times something passes through your brain, the more likely you are to remember. Also, do the readings from the textbook when the class is covering the same topic. Don't try to cram it all into your head the night, or even the weekend, before. Do the readings and take good notes. It makes your life a lot easier.

3. Breathe. It's just a test! Chances are good there'll be several more, and chances are really good that, no matter how nervous you are and how badly you bomb the first test, you can still pass the class. And even if you don't, most colleges have a grade-forgiveness policy, or allow you to withdraw so it doesn't impact your grade. Plus, remember how I mentioned that your teacher wants you to get a better grade? If you fail a test, go talk to the teacher. That's why they have office hours, and why they give you their contact informfation. They will work with you, and help you. So, breathe! It's just a test, and it's not the end of the world if it doesn't go well.

4. Take your time. I know some tests are timed, and I know that freaks people out. Back when I was working at the Open school, I helped proctor CSAP. I was helping with the special accomodations, students who needed extra time, or needed the test read aloud, or needed to type instead of hand write. I noticed something: of the students who had the extra time, not a single one used any more time than the other kids were allowed. But they felt better, they were less nervous, because they didn't have a time limit. Do not rush. Take your time.

5. If you get stuck, move on. Sometimes the answer will appear later in the test, sometimes you'll see what your problem is when you look at it again later, sometimes you'll end up not answering (or guessing) on one... but that's better than not getting to the end of the test. I know I said to take your time, but be mindful; if you're not making any progress, move on.

6. Don't cram! You'll want to study before the test, and that's a good idea, but if you've been working all semester, then you'll just be refreshing what you already knew. Learning one or two things the night before a test isn't bad, but don't try to learn it all that way! You'll stress yourself out, and even if you do manage to somehow remember enough to pass the test, it'll be short-term memory only; by the time the final rolls around, you'll have to learn it all again. On the other hand, if there's one thing you just can't manage to memorize, just before the test begins, write it down five times in a row. It will stick in your brain for at least the length of the test. Not a good idea to do often, but a handy trick, just in case.

The most important thing to remember is tht slow and steady wins the race. Study a little bit each week, or each night you have class. Do your homework, even if it is not collected, when it is assigned. A little bit at a time, all semester, and you will find that studying for the test itself is easy, you're less nervous, and your grades will go up.

A Box for Fluffy

For one of my classes this week, we started playing with Simile, a box modeling software whose "Evaluation" edition allows for fairly simple models to be built.

A box model is a simplified way of looking at a system, with boxes for reservoirs and fluxes to show what goes into and out of that reservoir. For example, a model of a lake would have a flux of the stream that feeds it going in, as well as one for rain, and would have one going out for evaporation. In complex systems, these are incredibly useful tools, and with software to do the calculations, you can see how a system will behave over time-- they are used to project into the future, and see what is likely to happen.

As with anything that purports to predict the future, there are some caveats. First and foremost, it is based on statistics; you can say that in a hundred years you will have a certain number of major floods, for example, but you can't say when they will happen. Second, a model is only as good as the data you put into it. If you know every single factor that feeds into a model with perfect accuracy, your model will be very, very good. But there are very few cases where that is true.

The first model we worked on was a wonderfully silly little thing involving, to quote the book, a "fairly fragile finicky freshwater fish" named Fluffy. Fluffy has to have flowing water to live, so we were designing a 'tank' for him that had water flowing in through the top and out through a hole in the bottom. If the water level went too low, Fluffy would die. If it got too high, it would run over the top and Fluffy would die. So we created a box model where we could vary the amount of water flowing in, to see where it would reach equilibrium.

For homework, we are working on something a little more complex: global temperture. Our models are going to be much, much simpler than the ones they use to predict climate change. The first one is based solely on the temperature of the oceans, which are, for the purposes of our model, assumed to be evenly distributed on the surface of the earth, at a consistent depth. The only reservoir is Earth's energy, the only inflow is solar radiation, and the only outflow is infrared radiation back out into space. This will remain the same, no matter how complex the model gets. For this model solar radiation doesn't change; in reality, it does. For this model, infrared radiation is based on the temperature of the ocean, which is based on the amount of energy in the Earth reservoir, which is based on solar radiation and infrared radiation into space. As the energy in the system rises, the temperature rises, but as the temperature rises, the amount of heat radiating out rises as well, which lowers the energy of the system. It will reach an equilibrium point.

Unfortunately, I am having trouble with my model; I think I put everything in correctly, but the system did not even out. I'm going to have to work on it some more. It gives me a new appreciation for the models they actually use in science; if I have difficulty with such a simple model, what must it take to make a really complex one work?

On the bright side, every new model that is proposed is better, more accurate than the last. We're getting better at it. And that means our predictions are getting more accurate. And that is always a good thing.

"I had no need of that hypothesis"

The above is what Pierre-Simon Laplace said to Napoleon when asked why his book on astronomy, unlike Newton's contained no mention of god. Newton had seen that his calculations were not entirely accurate, and had decided that what kept the planets from careening out of place was the hand of god. Laplace made some corrections, and was able to explain celestial motion without resorting to the supernatural.

I think that quote-- "I had no need of that hypothesis"-- is an important one. The more we learn about the universe, the less we need the supernatural to explain anything. There was a time when we did not understand much, and at that time, gods arose. What caused the lightning, or the rain, or the lack of it? An angry god, punishing the wicked. Likewise, favorable weather was caused by a happy god. Appease god, and things will go well. We know now about pressure systems and how weather works; we no longer have need of that hypothesis. Before Darwin, we had no idea how life came to be, in its many and varied forms. It was reasonable, then, that people believed god had made all the plants and animals, shaped them as an artist might. But Darwin saw a more reasonable way it could have happened; following the natural laws of the universe, life could have evolved to the state in which we now know it. And again, we now had a natural explanation, and have no more need of the god hypothesis. It is no longer reasonable to think that god did it, any more than it is reasonable to believe god causes the weather. We know how life came to be in its present form; we have no need of god.

As science advances, the need for god retreats. What once was seen as the vagaries of an all-powerful deity is now known to be simple cause and effect. It was, I think, simple cause and effect that led me to reject the idea of god. When you pray for something, and it happens, where, exactly, did god step in to give it to you? Say you prayed for a parking spot-- I know plenty of people that pray for that very thing, and other inanities. When you get to the store, there is a spot right up close-- your prayer was answered! But where did god come in? You left the house at such a time that when you arrived, someone else had just left. They left because they had an appointment to get to. That appointment had been set a week before, long before you prayed for that parking spot. Every effect has a cause, traceable by the laws of nature. Where is the need for god?

Some might say that god 'inspired' them to leave the house at the precise time they needed in order to get that parking spot, or 'inspired' the other person to leave at that time, but that falls apart too, if you think about it. Everything you did that day, including your thoughts, had a physical cause. We do not yet fully understand how the brain works, but we do know that thoughts are physical, chemical reactions in the brain. There is no need for a divine finger in your grey matter; you had that thought as a result of what came before.

So there is no need for a god in our day-to-day lives-- and, in fact, god cannot exist there. Everything follows physical laws. A miracle, were one to occur, would break those laws... but there is no evidence of anything breaking them, ever. There are no miracles that have been verified by science as having happened.

What about creation? Well, Darwin put paid to god creating life as it now exists. Abiogenesis-- that is, what sparked life in the first place-- is another matter... but given everything that we now know, it seems silly to simply say "god did it" when we could instead work on the problem and try to find out. And scientists are doing just that. There is no reason to believe that this one thing required a divine touch, when everything else can be explained by science.

And I do mean everything. We know how the planet formed, how stars and galaxies form. We've even got a pretty good handle on the Big Bang. We don't know exactly what sparked it... but there is reason to believe that we do not need a god, even there. I have just enough of a handle on the physics to put it very simply; I don't know it in great detail, but it is an explanation I got from Stephen Hawking, and I know just enough to find it reasonable. The universe, at the moment of the Big Bang, was infinitely small-- small enough, in fact, that it falls into the realm of quantum mechanics. In quantum mechanics, particles do not have a linear sort of existence; they pop in and out of existence, for lack of a better term, all the time. It is therefore not inconceivable that the universe itself, at the time a quantum particle, could have simply popped into existence. No need for that hypothesis, indeed!

But it goes further than that; with what we know of the Big Bang, and of the universe, it seems there is no place for god, period. To begin with, you have to understand that time, like space, is a physical dimension. We exist in a universe of (at least) four dimensions, three spatial, one temporal. This is known as space-time. Space time, it has been proven, can be warped; the most stunning example is that of a black hole. If you were to fall into a black hole, and could somehow survive to observe what was happening around you, time would slow for you, and eventually come infinitely close to a stand-still; you could look out at the universe and see eons flying by. So, time is a physical dimension, contained within the universe, just like space. When the infant universe popped into existence, it contained time, as well as space. Therefore, before the Big Bang, there was no time. Asking what happened before the Big Bang is like asking what is north of the North pole; it is a meaningless question.

Without time, without a before in which to exist, there could not have been a god before the universe that could have created it.

Some people will say that god is eternal, existing outside of time and space; such a god seems pointless to me. In order to influence the universe, whether by creating it, or life, or by intervening in people's day to day lives, god must be part of the universe. If god is part of the universe, then he is bound by the laws of nature (having been created by the Big Bang himself), and cannot violate them, and he cannot have existed before the Big Bang to do any sort of cosmic on-switching. If god is outside the universe, he cannot influence it.

There is just barely room, if you wish to see it this way, for the deist god. It is possible that, in whatever existed before the universe, whatever currently exists outside the universe, there was a being who could have caused the particle-universe to pop into existence. Such a being is not known to have ever influenced anything inside the universe, and so in my mind, speculating about its existence is meaningless. We can only know the universe, at least so far in our understanding. Who knows? Maybe someday we'll reach outside that boundary, beyond what we now know as existence, and find something else there. Since we cannot assume that what lies outside the universe obeys the same natural laws, I suppose things found there could be called "supernatural." Somehow, I think that kind of supernatural would not be very satisfying to many theists.

Little green microbes?

Life on Mars Found by NASA's Viking Mission?

Science reporting in the news is always a bit sketchy; a reporter gets more attention by making bold claims than by reporting on maybe and possibly. Whenever you read in the news about a scientific discovery, it should be taken with a sizeable grain of salt. Even so, this one is pretty damned cool.

Back in 1976 there was some evidence of life-processes taking place in Martian soil. Now, researches have done some math and found that those life-like-processes seem to be on a circadian rhythm that is consistent with the length of the Martian day. What does that really mean, though?

The search for life on other planets is a difficult thing; we can't know how similar or different it would be from life here on Earth. We can make some assumptions-- it would probably be carbon-based, simply because carbon is so abundant and so easy to combine with other things. All the life we know of is carbon-based. Some scientists have thought that if a life form existed that was not carbon-based, it would probably be silicon-based, simply because silicon has a lot of the same properties as carbon. But we don't know-- biologists, for this purpose, have a sample size of one. All the life they have ever observed is terrestrial life, carbon-based and built on DNA. Would life elsewhere be the same?

Some people think that life on Earth began when a meteorite from Mars crashed here and brought Martian life with it. If that is the case (and it is possible, though a little improbable), then life on Mars would be very similar to life here. We could assume that it would have DNA and be carbon-based and be very like the life we have here, just evolved in different ways. But what if it didn't? What if life began twice, in our solar system? Life on Mars needn't have anything in common with life on Earth. It probably would have some similarities-- I mentioned carbon above, and there are other factors that are similar enough on Mars and Earth that some things would likely be the same-- but we couldn't make any assumptions.

So how do you look for life? The original 1976 results showed that a Martian soil sample reacted the way one on Earth would, if that Earth soil sample contained microbial life. They ran several control experiments as well, which would not have elicited a result with the life-rich Earth soil, and they failed to do so with the Martian soil, either. How many assumptions are inherent in that test? Is it possible something other than life could have produced that result? Is it possible the rover brought microbes with it, and they contaminated the experiment? Too many factors, too many unknowns. But one has been eliminated now. It is not possible that Earth microbes produced the result-- Earth microbes would have had a different circadian rhythm. The fact that the results showed a circadian rhythm that would be consistent with the circadian rhythm Martian life would have if it did exist is fascinating, but is not proof of anything.

Is there life on Mars? Possibly. That's the best answer we have for now. The possibility has not been eliminated, and there are some tantalizing results that indicate that it might be true. And that's pretty damned cool.

Huzzah!

Well, today's meeting was a rousing success. We had roughly thirty-five people show up, none of whom left after grabbing a slice of pizza.

Naturally, I was nervous. In fact I spend twenty of the last thirty minutes leading up to the meeting freaking out, walking off nervous energy and telling myself it was silly to worry that we would only have three people, we had at least nine, from last Tuesday's meeting. It was also silly, I tried telling myself, to worry that I was either going to bore or offend every person that did show up. But telling myself something doesn't make me believe it.

Of course, when I got back to the lecture hall ten minutes before the meeting and found well over a dozen people already seated, most of those fears melted away. Not so for my treasurer, who apparently was worried a crazy fundamentalist was going to take advantage of their new right to conceal carry on campus and express their opinion of us with bullets. But then, he's from Texas, that's to be expected.

I'm going to be honest; it made me kind of happy when a person from the "Progressive Religious Orediggers" (who are associated with a local unitarian church) said she wanted to associate with us... and also said that she had practically no student interest. I'll be good, and we'll work with them, but it made me a little happy that my group was doing better.

I had two people immediately volunteer to be secretary, just after the meeting, and there was a lot of interest in another general meeting, so we've scheduled one two weeks from today, same time, same place. We think we're going to see if there's a faculty member or local speaker we can bring in. And there was a lot of interest in the Ask An Atheist table as well, for next Thursday. I've got some things to do on Orgsync, following today's meeting.

On top of all of that, we ended up with just about the perfect amount of pizza.

Everything really came together today-- on a personal note, I got registered, so I'm not worried about that anymore, and now I can focus on studying for my next physics exam, on Tuesday. But mostly for the group. Everything went really well, and I couldn't be happier.

The value of a day off

I've been doing a lot, lately. School has been busy, I've been working on starting a new organization, I've volunteered for four planning committees for next year's Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics, I've gone to career events, I've built a resume, I've sent a flurry of emails to various people, about everything from club business to inquiring about opportunities at Lockheed Martin, I've got my schedule for summer and fall planned, I've decided to declare an Area of Special Interest (which is like a minor, but fewer classes) in Space and Planetary Science and Engineering, and today I was dealing with the mess that is financial aid and paying for all of this. On top of all of that, a dear friend of mine is getting married in ten days, and I am maid of honor for her, and today her dad ended up in the ICU with clots in his brain. Oh, and there's the birthday party I went to, and rehearsals and planning meetings for the ensemble my mom and I sing in.

It's been a busy, stressful couple of weeks.

Mostly, I have been loving it. But I haven't had a whole lot of time to relax.

Today, I took a day off. Not from all the things I had to do-- obviously, I still had a lot to do, I couldn't take time off from everything-- but from being, well, me. The me that I have been, lately. The poised, confident, together, professional adult woman that I have been lately is awesome, but she is a little exhausting. I didn't really decide to take a day off; I stayed with my boyfriend for a night, so I didn't have a change of clothes or a hairbrush or anything, and I didn't get a chance to shower (because he doesn't have shampoo, and my hair is unmanageable without it.) So I put on one of his much-too-large-for-me t-shirts, and I threw my tangled hair back into a ponytail, and I let myself be a slob today.

I don't particularly like feeling like a slob, most of the time. I feel like I smell bad and that people will notice, or that they'll see the hairs that grow on my chin that I didn't get a chance to deal with, or they'll see how greasy my hair is, or how tangled it is. I always feel self-conscious when I haven't put any effort into my appearance, which may stun my friends, as I am not known to wear makeup or dress nicely terribly often. Dressing up has the opposite effect, for me-- if I look good, I feel better about myself. It's like putting on armor-- I feel more prepared for whatever life can throw at me.

But every once in a while it's nice to take a day off. Every once in a while it's good to remind myself that I don't have to be perfect all the time, that I am allowed to have off days, that I can get away with looking like a slob, that it doesn't really matter what they think (unless I have an interview or a presentation or something, in which case I'd dress up anyway).

Tomorrow I have to go back to being together; tomorrow is the inaugural meeting of the new SSA group at Mines, and I'm giving a presentation, and will be introducing myself as the president. I have to be me again for that. But today... today it was nice to not have that pressure.

The Old Boys' Club

When I was born, my dad tells me, he worried about the fact that I was a girl. Not that he thought I (and my sister, for that matter) would be any less capable of achieving our dreams, but he worried that we would not have as many opportunities. That was the eighties-- things were improving, but they were certainly not all the way there yet. They aren't today, either.

My parents did not press gender issues on my sister and I. I was allowed to wear all the frilly dresses I wanted, and my sister was encouraged to do all the sports she wanted. They shopped at "Play Fair Toys," a toy store that sadly no longer exists, where everything was non-discriminatory and Barbie was nowhere to be seen. And I was always, always told that I could do anything I wanted, when I grew up. I was brilliant and capable, they told me, and nothing would stop me if I didn't want it to. As a child, it never occurred to me that girls were not as smart as boys, or not as good at science and math-- to be honest, I always thought the opposite. Boys were strong, girls were smart. Boys were good at physical things, girls were good at school things.

When I showed an interest in science, my parents encouraged that as much as they had encouraged everything else, from the frilly dresses I loved as a kid to the sports Jess played to ballet classes. They-- well, Santa-- got me a telescope and the MASSIVE Smithsonian chemistry set that you probably can't buy anymore because it's unsafe. I was put into advanced science and math classes in school, and my mom took me to a summer chemistry class for kids up at CU Boulder. And when, many years later, I decided I wanted to study physics and attend the Colorado School of Mines, they were proud. No one-- not me, not my family, not my friends-- questions whether I could do it. Of course I could-- hadn't they said all along that I could do anything I wanted?

My dad worried, though. Those old, nagging doubts about my being a girl came back full force, as I prepared to go into a field that had always been and still was very much dominated by men. It's an old boys' club, he told me. Are you sure you are ready for this? he asked. He wasn't trying to dissuade me; Dad worries, it's just what he does. He was trying to warn me. I might never have met anyone who thought I couldn't do something because I was a girl, but they were out there, and choosing to study physics and go to Mines, I was increasing the chances that I would run into them.

This is something I think about a lot; the fact that so many people have warned me about something that I have never felt the effect of. I wonder if I am merely oblivious to it, or perhaps if other people are more sensitive. I wonder if perhaps I was always so far ahead of everyone else that it didn't matter. (Yes, I have a healthy ego. It's also not an unreasonable thing for me to wonder.) If I had been less advanced, would people have discouraged me because of my gender? Or was I just incredibly lucky, to have led a life where such things never touched me?

Every year, the American Physical Society (a professional organization for physicists and people interested in physics) sponsors a Convention for Undergraduate Women in Physics, on about half a dozen campuses around the country. This year, in January, several of our students went, and they offered to have Mines be one of the host campuses next year. One of the really interesting things about this convention is that it is organized almost entirely by students; they were asking for volunteers to help out. So I signed up; I'm on four committees. Not only is this something that I think is a really good idea, something that I care a lot about, it's also something that will look really, really good on a resume.

Next year is going to be a really busy year...

LASERS and SPACE and SCIENCE!

Yesterday I got an email regarding internships at the Mines Center for Space Resources, for which I am hopelessly underqualified but for which I am going to apply anyway. One of them involves working with Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy. I've talked before about how neat lasers are, and I've mentioned that some time I should blog about spectroscopy. This is the perfect opportunity to do so!

Spectroscopy is a method by which we can tell the chemical composition of something based on the light it emits. Which is really neat, because all we have from outer space is light-- well, electromagnetic radiation, actually, but it's the same thing. It's not like we can send a probe to a star to test its chemical composition. We have a hard enough time sending probes to Mars! But using spectroscopy, we can look at the light a star-- or any celestial object-- emits (or reflects), and we can see what it is made of. That, to me, is freaking COOL.

To understand how it work, you have to have a little bit of quantum mechanics. That might seem scary, but it's really not that bad. Imagine the simplest atom you can, a hydrogen atom. It has one proton, which makes up the nucleus, and one electron, which orbits that-- sort of, but there's no reason to equivocate on that topic today. The electron, it turns out, can have different energy levels. What's interesting is that they are distinct-- it's like if your car could go zero, five, ten, and twenty miles per hour, but nothing in between. You would be stopped, and then without transition, you would be moving. These energy states are called "quantized" because they have distinct, specific quantities. This is why the word "quantum" came to be used for subatomic physics.

Anyway, you have one electron, and it can have several different, distinct energy states. If the atom is excited-- that is, energy is introduced, and the atom absorbs it-- the electron will pop up to one of the higher levels. But an atom does not like to stay excited for long, so soon enough, the electron will pop back down to a lower level, and when it does that, it emits a photon-- that is, a light carrying particle. It gets rid of that extra energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation. And because those energy levels are quantized, so are those emissions of light. If you were in your quantized car, as described above, and you wanted to drop from twenty miles per hour to zero, you would have to get rid of a lot more energy than if you went from twenty to ten. So it is with the electron. The more energy it needs to emit to get back to a lower level, the higher frequency light it will emit.

The electromagnetic spectrum is huge. It goes all the way from radio waves, whose wavelengths can be as long as football fields, to gamma radiation, which is so high energy it's extremely bad for you. Right in the middle, a tiny sliver makes up the visible spectrum of light. At the 'top' with the highest energy is blue-- a little bit more energy, and it goes into ultraviolet light, which we can't see without help. At the 'bottom' with the lowest energy (and longest wavelength) is red-- a little bit less energy, and it goes into infrared, which again we can't see without help. Between the two are the colors of the rainbow. When we see colorless light, we are seeing a blend of those wavelengths.

So our hydrogen atom's electron is bouncing around, as quantum particles are wont to do, and it is emitting photons whenever it jumps down. It turns out that four of those emissions are in the visible light spectrum. When we view light emitted from excited hydrogen, we see four distinct lines. And it turns out that no other element has those exact lines-- in fact, every element has its own set of distinct spectral lines. We can even see it if the electrons are jumping up instead of down-- they absorb light, so there will be a dark line in that element's signature places. Now we have a means of telling what kind of particles emitted the light we are seeing-- or, in the case of absorption lines, what the light bounced off before it reached us.

How cool is that? We can look at the light from a star millions of light years away, and we can do a little math, and say for certain what that star is made of. SO COOL.

Now, a little bit about Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy. It's a lot easier to do this sort of thing when you have a burning gas then when you have a solid-- everything emits radiation, but it's not usually in the visible spectrum. So what do we do, if we want our Mars rover to be able to tell what something is made of? We either give it a big fancy chemical lab that can do all sorts of tests... or we give it a high-powered laser. Curiosity, which is on its way to Mars currently, has such a laser. When it lands, it will be able to point that laser at a rock and vaporize a tiny part of it, energizing those atoms in the process, and from there, it can read the spectral lines. It doesn't have to pick up rocks or do complicated chemical tests. It just zaps a rock, which can be however far away, and analyzes it from there.  How cool is that?

I love my school-- I have an opportunity, albeit and unlikely one, to work with this really cool science that I am so fascinated by.

Also, science is AWESOME.

Babies!

I don't intend to have children.

For years my grandmother (among others) has been telling me that some day I would change my mind. Well, I'm 27 now, and I'm still feeling no desire for them. Plus, I'll be in school for another three or four years at least, and that's if I don't go for a PhD. If I do, who knows? Another couple of years after that, more if I decide to try to work while I do it. And I would want to get established in my career, before I even thought about children, plus I would want the father to also be in a good, steady career, since I would have to take some time off for maternity leave... long story short, even if I were to change my mind at some point, it's going to be at least ten years before I'm ready, and 37 is a bit old to start a family. But really, those are just excuses. I don't want children.

Even so, they can be really cute sometimes.

Today I went to a little girl's first birthday party. Amira is my brother-in-law's sister's child. I have no idea what relation she is to me. She's a sweet little girl, though. When we got there she was playing with a partially deflated balloon that her parents had given to her because it was not likely to pop if she played with it too hard. A little while later she had been given a helium-filled balloon, which she held by the ribbon and carried around for at least twenty minutes.

After lunch we opened her presents, and that was delightful, too. It didn't take her long to learn how it went-- her dad would give her a box whose paper she could tear to her heart's content, or a bag that had more paper in it she could crinkle and tear. Sometimes she would even notice that there was something else in the bag or the box and get that out, but often she was more entertained by the paper. She got a lot of things that weren't that entertaining to her-- clothes and things in boxes, like a baby pool-- so that makes some sense. Some of the things she was delighted by-- toys that she could make do things or make noise, or things that were soft. My mom had gotten her two little stuffed kitties (because Amira loves my mom's cats) that she rolled around on the floor with and squealed delightedly over.

Then came the cake. Her parents had not, up until today, given her anything with refined sugar. She has had fruit, and she loves the sweet things that she has had, but she had never had anything like the decadent flourless chocolate cake that they gave her today. When they put it in front of her she didn't seem to recognize that it was food at first. Then she poked at it gently, but wouldn't dig in until they gave her a fork, which I think is amusing. Of course, once she got a taste of it, she was delightful, and it was all over her-- her face, her hands, her hair, her dress, everywhere. Which is exactly as it should be. Probably my favorite picture of myself as a baby was from my first birthday. There's a before and after to it: the cake, a glorious, light blue care bear cake, actually in the shape of a bear... and then me, fistfulls of icing, icing all over my face, looking like the happiest kid in the world. It's adorable.

So yeah. Children can be pretty adorable. As long as I'm not the one changing the diapers and dealing with the tantrums and such.

(I know, I missed a golden opportunity to make baby-eating jokes, and it's Easter*, but this post was long enough.)

*Atheists traditionally get together for a nice baby roast** on Easter, you know

**Some prefer fetuses, but I have a pretty big family, and babies serve more people

It's (almost) official!

On Thursday, I and a couple others from my group met with Dr. Shorey, who was interested in being our faculty advisor. Dr. Shorey is probably my favorite professor that I have yet met at Mines. He's a paleoclimatologist who teaches in the Geology department, and I am so fond of his teaching method that I went out of my way to have him again this semester. He uploads all his lecture powerpoints to his website-- but a lot of professors do that. He also has a podcast series for every topic he lectures on-- if you miss a class, you can go and listen to the lecture. Best of all, he has a list of objectives for every subject, things that might apper on the test. He talks a lot about things that are not objectives, and many of these things are fascinating, but having the objectives makes note-taking and studying vastly easier. But none of these are why I like him so much. I like him because he is incredibly enthusiastic about what he does. I love it.

So Dr. Shorey was interested in being our advisor. He runs the AV club, offered to help us do podcasts, or take videos of speakers to share. He has some great ideas about speakers and discussions we can have. He brought the same enthusiasm to us that he brings to the classroom. This makes me very happy; having a faculty advisor who is so enthusiastic and so on board will make this all very much easier. So we got him to sign our paperwork, and I turned it in that afternoon.

Less than an hour later I had an email to set up our orgsync page. Orgsync is the website that all student groups are encouraged to use for organization, scheduling, and such. I got it set up, created events for our upcoming meeting and for Ask An Atheist Day, invited all the group members for which I had contact info. I also set up a twitter account for us (@SSACSM), and through orgsync, set up a website.

We will hopefully be made official on tuesday, that being the next time the student board meets, and they need to approve our application. I submitted the application to officially affiliate with the SSA, with a note that we were not yet official but would be, soon. We've got the lecture hall reserved for our introductory meeting on Thursday, and fliers are up advertising it. I've been working on my presentation/talk for that meeting. I've also found out who I need to talk to in order to set up a table for Ask An Atheist Day.

I said it before, but I will say it again: here we go!