Interesting discussion

I've got a bit of an argument over political philosophy going on over in the "Everything Not Beer" section of the FTH Forums. Read the argument here.

In the last week, I've read Only a Trillion, View From a Height, Robot Dreams, and Puzzles of the Black Widowers, all by Isaac Asimov. I'm currently working on The Mask of Nostradamus by James Randi and the first in the Baroque Cycle, Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson.

I've got some new pictures of myself. I'll put one up on the profile today or tomorrow.

Wha, wha, whaa?*

*with apologies to Jon Stewart.

I didn't know that Tom Tomorrow would use the word "shit". Fascinating, the coarsening of our culture, isn't it?

I've been chilling out and relaxing the last couple of days, trying to relax before summer classes start and reading a bunch of Asimov. I'll have more in-depth posts in a day or two.

When the weekend ends....

I ended up getting an A in that Biology class after all. One down, thirty-ish to go!

We didn't get to go to the graduation on Saturday, due to extenuating circumstances with the friend we were going to ride with. Hopefully I'll get to go down and see the friend who graduated in the next couple of weeks. I did get to call him on his cell before his graduation, and congratulated him about seventy times.

Last night we had planned to invite some of our other friends over for steaks and salad, but it turned out that one of their relatives had been in a car accident, and they weren't even in town for it. So after we cleaned up the apartment and bought a lot of good food (I even drove to Fayetteville to get some Belgian beers to share) we ended up sans company. We cooked the steaks for ourselves, anyway, and I had an Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout while grilling and a Terrapin Wake-and-Bake Coffee Oatmeal Imperial Stout with the meal. Both great beers.

Beth had set up some candles so we could have a somewhat romantic meal by candlelight, and had used some Folgers coffee grounds as filler for two of the candleholders in the place of sand. It gave a nice appearance, but as the candle burned down, it actually set the coffee grounds on fire, creating a fair amount of smoke. Interestingly, it created a nice aroma and melted the grounds into hard "chunks" of material.

Curious, after cleaning up from dinner I took the two candleholders outside, laid some aluminum foil on top of the grill, spread the grounds over the foil, and attempted to light the grounds to see what would happen. At first the grounds wouldn't light, but a bit of lighter fluid gave us a nice blue flame -- lots of smoke, and a nice blue flame. While the coffee grounds smell nice when they merely singe and melt, the actual burning is not pleasant, and I wouldn't recommend it. Oh, well, one idea down the tubes.

I created an AIM account for myself (danielharper2006) in addition to my ICQ account (313312493) so I could chat with my mom when she's on AOL. We had a nice pleasant chat Saturday morning, before my day had really started but after she had already run two loads of laundry, had a shower, and helped take care of the baby. Nothing like talking with my mother to make me feel like a layabout, but I love her anyway.

I'm going to try to get a new photo of myself and post it in my profile in the next few days. I've recently shaved, after having been bearded for several years, and think it might be nice to show my face to the world for a change. I promise I won't be like this guy, though.

Hear hear!

Very short post today. Saw this on ScienceBlogs, and agree wholeheartedly with it.

What invention of the last 100 years would we be better off without?

Going to a friend's college graduation today, so this is likely all I'm going to do computer-wise. Hopefully more tomorrow.

Tidbits for Cinco de Mayo

Took Beth out to lunch today to our favorite Mexican place, Guadalajara on South Parkway. We got our usual meals, she had a margarita, I had a Bud Light. Yeah, I know, but somehow Mexican food and crappy beer kinda go together.

Afterwards I stopped by Great Spirits and, lo and behold, they had finally gotten some more Rogue Dead Guy in stock. Bought a sixer and a single I haven't had before.

Then I went to UAH campus and signed up for the math placement test. I'm studying this week, so I arranged to be there at 9:30 AM on May 16th. Hopefully I can place into Calculus, despite my six-year absence from any math classes.

Also stopped by the UAH library to look up some more information on amylase, which was unfortunately a bust. I did find several Isaac Asimov essay collections I haven't read, though, so the trip wasn't a total loss.

I'm going to spent the time until Beth comes home drinking a Dead Guy and reading Asimov. Not a bad way to spend a Friday afternoon, if you can get away with it.

Libertarianism?

Over at Dispatches From the Culture Wars, Ed Brayton has had several posts (see here, here, and here) that deal in whole or in part with libertarian political philosophy. As a teenager, I felt strongly that libertarian philosophy was the most self-consistent and logical political stance one could take, and that as such it should be the political philosophy of choice for any reasoning person (in other words, I was caught up in the works of Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein), but as I have gotten older I have moved further away from such a position.

Now, this is no way invalidates the concept of self-consistency or logic in judging the worth of political theory, not in the slightest. Indeed, I feel that many of the mistakes that our government makes (particularly under the oh-so-inspired leadership of Shrub) could be remedied --or at least mediated-- by properly involving a bit more logic and self-consistency. However, I feel that many of the claims of libertarian philosophy are based more on a Socratic or more properly Scholastic methodology instead of an empical one.

By a Scholastic methodology, determining truth or falsity of a particular statement (in modern-day logical terms) is to be done by examining a set series of writings, such as the works of Aristotle, and simply uncoverng hidden truths about the subject being studied through introspection and interpretation of the ancient text. Likewise, as Michael Shermer so ably demonstrated here, many of the modern-day libertarian thinkers (who oh-so-ironically call themselves Objectivists) take exactly this approach to the works of Ayn Rand and other (very few!) libertarian thinkers. A strange phenomenon indeed for a group that insists on its own independent thought and individual reasoning.

It is actually perhaps a bit unfair to compare all libertarian thinkers with the cult-like mentality exposed by Shermer -- after all Brayton himself is by no means beholden to the texts of Rand, and neither are those at The Cato Institute. However, such cult-like activity by those extreme libertarians holding to the Holy Texts of Ayn Rand are, I feel, a fairly reasonable symptom of the thought of other libertarians who are so enraptured in their own political philosophy that they lose touch with reality.

An example, not from Brayton, but from a commenter on one of the entries above.

Not only would I legalize drugs like cocaine, but I would also legalize all prescription drugs. At the same time, I would make the FDA approval process voluntary. If a pharma company decides to obtain FDA approval, it would receive qualified immunity from product liability suits. Fraud/failure to disclose during the approval process would of course, negate any immunity.

The government simply should not have the right to tell me what I can legally ingest. If I am suffering from MS and I find that Tysarbi (or marijuana or Vioxx or whatever) works for me, I should be able to use it. Banning a drug because of rare, fatal side effects is not a choice for the government. I should be able to make that risk assessment myself.

Now, of course, I agree that the "War-on-Drugs" is a terrible policy debacle that should be ended, and I am generally in support of allowing people to make up their own minds. But gutting the FDA (or at least declawing it)? It sounds good on paper, but as other commenters in the thread demonstrate, such an idea really leads us back to something like the olden days of snake-oil salesmen, in that medical doctors suddenly have no independent body doing research into a drug's efficacy for them. In short, consumers get screwed because large-scale organizations (namely, pharmaceutical corporations) have the money and power to keep truth out of the hands of ordinary individuals, and even have the civil right to not have to share information.

One could possibly get around this with independent accrediting bodies for pharmaceuticals, but don't we then run into the problem of collusion amongst the accrediting agencies and the manufacturers of drugs?

I think that an objective, empirical view of these matters indicates that there are certain functions (namely, I would argue, regulation, healthcare, and education, among others) that corporations simply don't do well, due to the difficulty in maintaining profit margins in these areas. I hate paying taxes as much as the next guy, but for those taxes the government provides me with safety, with infrastructure, with regulation insuring the meat I buy, the drugs I take, the air I breathe, et cetera will be clean and safe to use, and many other functions.

I say let all the real hard-core libertarians go set up shop in the newly-unoccupied areas of Iraq or Afghanistan and set up Libertopia over there. When I've seen it work on a non-trivial level, I'd be happy to try to enact reforms over here. Until then, some "big government" regulatory and functional bodies are necessary.

Why I'd Make a Terrible Father

As I mentioned earlier, Beth and I spent Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning with my mother and my sister, who has a now-six-month old baby (cute pictures here) named Camden, who is cute and adorable and endlessly watchable even when he's not feeling well due to tubes having been put in his ears, as was the case over the weekend. Now, I can't say I'm overly fond of children in general, having a general preference for the intellectual and social world of adults, but Camden's a cute kid, and I can certainly imagine feeling more love for the little brats when (or if) I ever have one of my own.

So anyway, Camden was lying on the floor Saturday night kicking at one of his toys, when a bit of drool escaped from the side of his mouth. Being the good uncle (and having a napkin handy) I wiped the fluid from the side of his mouth, cleaned his face in general, then started thinking:

I wonder when babies start to produce amylase?

A bit of explanation is at hand. Enzymes are macromolecules (proteins, actually) that act as catalysts to allow high-energy chemical reactions to take place in relatively low-energy regions, such as the human body. For instance, the body "burns" sugars in the muscles through the breaking off of phosphate groups from ATP molecules -- an enzyme binds to the phosphate group and removes it with what's known as a dehydration reaction to "burn" the molecule, while in ordinary circumstances the energy required to burn off that bit of energy would require temperatures far in excess of what the human body could stand. Enzymes are not magical chemicals -- far from it -- but they are one of the things that make life fairly unique in the universe, and much of the study of biochemistry is really the study of enzymes.

Amylase is an enzyme found in saliva (and in the pancreas, but that's another issue) that binds with certain chemical bonds in starches and breaks them down into molecules that are usable in the production of energy and proteins by the organism. (It is of course aided by digestive enzymes in the stomach and intestines, but that's a bit out of field here.) In my Intro to Biology course at UAH, one of our labs involved placing ground up cereal grains into a solution of water and amylase, and oberving the carbon dioxide produced by enzymmatic action. In the lab, we used professionally-obtained (or perhaps synthesized) amylase, but in theory could have simply used our own saliva to break down the cereal, although saliva contains other enzymes as well.

My curiosity, then, was at what age amylase was produced by the human body, in particular by the salivary glands. I was struck by the incredible urge to collect a few milliliters of Camden's saliva (not difficult, I assume, given the production of fluids by babies) and an equal amount of my own, mix each with some cereal or some other starch (like crackers) and place them both next to a control and a timer. And I might have done exactly that, except that the child's mother and grandmother were sitting right there playing with their baby and otherwise being perfectly normal, well-adjusted individuals, and might have taken offense to my doing strange experiments with their child's saliva.

How easy would it be to imagine me using one of my own children as a little walking, talking microbiology lab, blithely ignoring their needs so that I could satiate my own curiosity regarding their development in a hands-on, somewhat-controlled way? I have no doubt that I'll soon end up living up to the self-given moniker "Weird Uncle Daniel" anytime now.

I've got no problems with psychology, I promise

Just stuck a photo into the MyHeritage.com Celebrity face analyzer. Guess who I look like?



That's right, crazy-ass, couch-jumping, anti-depressant-pooh-poohing, placenta-eating Tom Cruise. (Oh, and also a huge movie star who has made quite a few really really fuckin' good movies. And one more to boot.

I'd throw up the picture it gave me for comparison, but MyHeritage won't let me save the pictures it throws up (damned Flash!). My other matches include Sean Connery, Sylvester Stallone, Meg Ryan (!), and Kenneth Branaugh. I can go with that.

Since I'm linking to the Superficial above, and in a blatant attempt to increase my visit count, I'm also linking to Jessica Alba being a tease, getting all Sapphic with Rosario Dawson (I wish!), wearing a bikini, picking a wedgie in a totally sexy way, and bending over in a white bikini. You're welcome.

Oh, and I just did this picture of Beth.



One of hers was Christy Turlington. Whoo-hoo! I'm engaged to a mid-90's supermodel! (Not a supermodel in her mid-90's, mind you...)

And we thought Texas was bad

Oh, dear God. Wasn't Roy Moore enough for my poor state?

Beth sent me this link from one of the local news station websites this morning. At least the local Democratic Party isn't supporting his nomination.

He's behind in the polls, but as the wag says, is that because he's a holocaust-denier, or because he's an atheist?

Our tax dollars at work, and a link or two.

Over the weekend I went to visit my family down in Millbrook, which took me out of my comfortable little cocoon here long enough to give me some interesting stuff to talk about. I'll be covering it over the next couple of days.

On the drive back, a bit south of Birmingham, Beth and I witnessed a single-car accident. I was on the phone with UncleFlip, arranging a meeting place so he could give me the two bottles of Dark Lord Imperial Stout when out of the corner of my eye I some movement in my rearview mirror. The car in the lane beside me smashed into the metal divider that separated the lanes of traffic on I-65, spun around 360 degrees, and made a huge squealing noise and kicked up a lot of dust. Basically smashing in the entire front end of the vehicle at some 65-70 miles per hour.

"Oh, shit," I said, still on the phone with Flip.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

"Yeah, I'll call you back."

Utterly calm and collected, I pulled off on the side of the road, hung up with flip, and dialed 911. After a moment with a very professional emergency operator (the kind I hope I'd get to speak to if I were ever in a danger spot), Beth and I got out my Mazda to walk back and see if there was anything we could do. We'd moved ahead of the other vehicle by maybe five hundred feet, and trudging back there through the weeds on the side of the interstate was fairly rough going, but not too bad. Still, by the time we got to the other vehicle (some sort of white or silver sedan), a fire engine and a local cop were pulling up to the scene.

We happened to have pulled off onto the other side of the interstate, so the cop yelled to us, "Are you involved?" as he walked up.

"No, we just called it in."

He made a hand motion to stay back and checked on the occupant of the vehicle. A youngish foreign girl who couldn't have been more than twenty or so, she seemed unharmed by the incident and was stepping out of the car when the cop got there.

After a few minutes of watching (traffic was getting backed up, as well) and yelling to no less than two firefighters that we weren't involved, that we just called it in, the cop crossed the street (carefully, mind you) and asked me what I saw. I told him that I had seen the car hit the rail in my rearview mirror and had called in the accident. He thanked me and told me to be on my way.

I was amazed at the speed at which it happened. No less than ten minutes after witnessing the accident, we were back in our car and on the way. And then my hands started shaking a bit, likely from the adrenaline rush. The rest of the three-hour drive to Huntsville was a bit rough, not least because a bit later it started raining, and I was feeling just a bit twitchy.

Interesting how I was utterly calm at first, and only began to stress out over it later. Selective advantage or neutral drift I can't say, but obviously the adrenaline system has its quirks.

And, on a completely different note:

This is a link to Stephen Colbert's speech at the White House Correspondent's Dinner on Saturday. I'm a huge fan of The Colbert Report, and this is some really good material from him.

Zazzafooky is a personal blog that I'm working through the archives of. Heartfelt oddities from an often humorous but often painful personal perspective of an Angeleno. It's interesting stuff.