January 2006 Archives

Well, here we are.

http://www.bpa.gov/corporate/education/science_bowl/Pics/06_High_Winners/Wilson.jpg

I was talking to Fisher today, and apparently she received an email from a professor at MIT who is both a disciple of Jay Forrester and eminant in the world of system dynamics. They want Jonathan and me to build and present a model on CO₂ and global warming in the atmosphere at some kind of conference on sustainability in Detroit in March. Oh how I hope I can go!!

I was thinking this morning while riding the bus and MAX over to the car show this morning, and I was suddenly struck with a bunch of interesting ideas for poetry. You thought I wasn't poetic? I'm not, but writing for its own sake when in the mood is highly satisfying. Plus I want to inundate the Veridian this year. I'm hoping that I can displace some of the writing even worse than mine, which they inevitably have to publish because they can never get enough submissions due to their substandard publicity.

After my escapades with my social experiment downtown, I suddenly have this fascination with society's detritus: the sorts of wackos and homeless people that you kindly ignore on the bus and street. Among "normal" and "respectable" people, there is an extremely strong tendency to try to ignore the very existence of all these people. When you are young and encounter panhandlers or homeless nuts ranting about Jesus and the apocalypse with your parents, they always make sure to quietly murmur something like, "Just ignore him, dear." So, you grow up behaving precisely the same: ignore them at all cost. And maybe that's socially the best option. By acknowledging their existence, you are implicitly validating their panhandling, ranting, etc. This type of behavior is not socially or economically desirable. Furthermore, most panhandlers actually either make a substantial amount of money or use their earnings to buy drugs. Regardless, the point is that we have an entrenched form of conduct in these situations.

This morning, I was sitting near this old guy on the train who possessed an extraordinary scent of urine, and I thought about our social convention. There was a rather sketchy-looking character reciting Revelations from the Bible to his fellow rider, who appeared to writing furiously. By the simple virtue of the fact that these people live either on the street or in some kind of equivalent squalid condition, they probably possess very interesting life histories. Not interesting in a positive way, but still quite compelling. It seems very difficult to make informed decisions on social issues without really knowing the circumstances that lead to problems like homelessness and drug use in the first place. I can make a bunch of suppositions about socio-economic background and education, but these explanations are grounded in common sense, not real observations. I think next time I have some time to kill and am in an appropriate situation, I'll share a few words with these seedy people. Thankfully muggings are rare enough in Portland during broad daylight that I doubt there's more than a shade of possible danger.

If nothing else, it will be a good primer in the street smarts I will desperately need to gain if I ever end up at U Chicago. I'm the kind of person who would be target practice for the gansters of the south Chicago ghetto.

If you know me, you've probably listened to one of my rants about how speech and debate is becoming a disaster this year. We won 2nd in the state last year and lost one productive senior, yet we have been sucking severely for the entire year. According to Leeor, today's tournament at McMinnville may be the turning point. Without Colin, Hannah, a few underclassmen, and I, the great Kadish and his underlings pulled off a 2nd place finish. Also this week, Hannah agreed to start doing speech again. She took a mysterious and highly frustrating "break" from it ever since she became the state champion in After Dinner Speaking last year. We may be on the mend!

I'll cut to the chase. As of today, Ari Allan-Feuer, Colin Corbett, Erik Werstler, Carlin Kersch, and I are headed for Washington DC at the end of April. Wilson's team just had a complete outright victory in the 2006 Regional Science Bowl for Oregon and Washington. Maybe it was because of Ari's "intimidation tactics," or perhaps it was our fantastic team dynamic, but it was nonetheless. Because there are apparently other parents who read my blog for information on this matter, I'll give a "brief" account.

The field of 64 teams was broken down into eight preliminary divisions of eight, which played four randomly seeded matches. In our first three rounds we went up against Catlin Gable, McNary, and David Douglas. In each of these rounds we scored roughly between 110 and 160, while always holding our opponents to less than 25. The initial victory over Catlin was particularly heartening simply by virtue of Catlin's reputation and our uncertainty of our abilities in the first round. It always inspires confidence when the public school "delinquents" route students in academic competitions who pay $30,000/year for their high school tuition. The fourth round was similar: we scored a shade over 100 and held Canby to 18.

Entering the double elimination bracket, the trend continued as we beat Wilsonville by about 40 points. A little bit of sense was smacked back into us in our next and closest match against Woodinville. Colin and Ari each made a crucial error, but we scraped away with a win by a margin of one question in overtime. Woodinville only survived a round or two longer in the consolation bracket before being knocked out by Lincoln. Here we were at a critical junction. I know that I felt a little bit of shell-shock from the round against Woodinville, and this feeling was not assuaged by an upcoming round against Oregon Episcopal School. Two OES students had just been featured in an Oregonian article one week earlier for being finalists in the Intel Talent Search--arguably the most prestigious science competition in the country. The school is notorious for its success in science competitions, and students there are paired with researchers and engage in projects that span many years. It goes without saying, then, that we were quite relieved to beat them by something like 20 to 100.

We spent the next half hour analyzing the brackets, and listening to Ari rant about calculating the probability for our victory in the next round against Jesuit. The girl on the OES team mentioned that Jesuit was rather good. This concern was furthered by our observation that Jesuit beat Lincoln, who beat Woodinville in consolation, against whom we only persevered by the skin of our teeth. The afternoon was filled with this type of neurotic bracket analysis, which invariably left us only more worried. Yet, even with a couple of odd challenges to procedure, we came out with a win of about 50 to their 20. After the consolation bracket shook out, we marched into the final round, once again facing Jesuit. And once again, we took them down, this time with a 66 to 22 victory. And there you have it. Wilson will off to nationals to have a blast in DC and get slaughtered by the Neo-Nazi teams from East Coast schools like Thomas Jefferson in Virginia. I'm content being merely mediocre or "pretty good" compared to these teams if it means that I get to actually enjoy life a little.

The distinctly wonderful thing about this year, more than our scores and victories, is the team dynamic which materialized today. To be sure, we are an odd lot. Ari, for instance, spent a significant amount of time this morning lecturing us about how one of the most defining characteristics of humans is neotony. Carlin's personality, on the other hand, may best be exemplefied by his hair, which has only been cut once in the three years I have known him. Indeed, Colin Corbett or I may actually be the most socially "conventional" people on the team--considering how odd and grotesquely nerdy we are, you can get a sense of the team's incredible quirkiness. Yet, even with that, we have a remarkable ability to cooperate to construct answers to bonus questions, work out substitutions, and complete all team functions like a well oiled machine sans a shred of conflict.

Unlike last year, the team is no longer entirely dependent on Ari. Certainly, Ari is still the backbone of the team. But when Ari has a sour round, the rest of the team can compensate extremely well. The scores are proof of that. True, Ari usually dominates, but he is in fact human. Our remarkable consistency of wide margins of victory is evidence of a highly balanced machine.

So what can I say? We're going to nationals! It's nice to be on a team with such flawless execution and cooperation. It's also comforting to know that, although we may lose to them in sports, we from Wilson can still rise above our west-side rival, the rest of our PIL bretheren, and the "superior" private schools in academic competition as diverse as science bowl, speech and debate, and even mock trial (on a good day). Maybe public schools aren't so bad after all, eh?

Addition: ... And the stupid response of the day goes to... Colin Corbett! We were ahead in the match and no one seemed to know the answer to a short answer toss up about an obscure physical law. Colin buzzed in and said, in an attempt at humor, "Article Thirteen of the US Constitution." Sorry Colin, but the constitution only has seven articles. No offense intended. The distinction did have to go to someone.

31, 41, 59, 26, 53, 58, dot, dot, dot!!! Hike!

Science Bowl is tomorrow.

I started International Trade today at Reed. There's no question that Reed is an institution vastly superior to Lewis and Clark. Assuming they let me stick around (the class is pushing its cap), it's going to be really fun. The professor is excellent and the material is the kind of stuff I love. I even said something moderately intelligent today! I explained why indifference curves, by definition, must have a negative slope. At least it made it look like I actually did read all of the intro texts like I said I would. Now, if they would just update the e-reserve, I would be perfectly happy.

School just got really difficult all of a sudden. Actually, I should rephrase. School is rarely difficult in any regard other than the sheer volume of work. Maybe I feel this way because profe recently decided to assign us a research project on the Spanish Civil war, a parody movie of La Catrina, a proyecto cultural, and a massive 3-part final exam. Physics also started at Lewis and Clark last week. This class is going to be really fun. I think that the upper-division physics classes are vastly superior to the lower ones. There are lots of juniors and seniors, so the class is a lot more capable and insightful.

I've been working on a STELLA model of avian flu (H5N1). I spent about 3 hours at the Lewis and Clark library yesterday reading books on mathematical modelling of epidemics, and I think I have come to the conclusion that you really can only do so much with deterministic mathematical modeling. The only thing for which I can imagine it being really effective is certain economic applications, but I'm no expert in that area. I guess it works for large sample groups that can be assumed to be homogeneous, but that is rarely a reasonable assumption. There's a lot of work using so-called "stochastic" mathematical models, which I don't understand well. From what I can tell, they use Markov chains and discrete time intervals to add an element randomness to the models. Of course, I only have the vaguest notion of what this all means, and needless to say, STELLA doesn't actually have any of these capabilities. I'm also feeling drawn back to the notion of using a non-analytic simulation written in Python. It makes a lot of sense to do this to emulate the host-parasite interactions that exist in my back-burner rice model, but I think it would be appropriate in this scenario too. On the flip-side, analytic methods seem a lot more practical for my idea of modeling economic stabilization techniques in the Asian financial crisis. In that situation, the entire focus isn't on one type of discrete unit (like people or rice plants), but on broad macroeconomic indicators like GDP and capital flows. I guess the lesson is to choose methods carefully to fit the problem and to eradicate deadlines from one's life.

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A New Frontier in Science

History has seen its share of scientific revolutions: from relativity, to the discovery of the atom, to the development of creationism, humans are constantly expanding their vast knowledge of nature. Some consider Darwin’s development of evolutionary theory to be among these great leaps forward. For decades, though, leading biologists have grown increasingly unhappy with evolution’s numerous shortcomings. Lately, much of the scientific community has been hijacked by rabid, ideological secularists who have continually tried to eradicate opposition to their dogma of blind evolution.

A new path has emerged from the crumbling tower of evolutionary theory: Intelligent Design (ID). ID realizes that a fundamental premise of evolution—that species change and adapt over time—is fact, and cannot be challenged. The reason that we have so many different types of dogs, for example, is because humans harness evolution for selective breeding. Unlike evolution however, ID posits that life, as we know it, is too complicated to have occurred by random evolution alone. Only an intelligent, non-denominational designer could have been capable of creating the complex biological structures we see today. New studies in Intelligent Design are also showing that such a non-denominational creator may have also been integral in actively guiding evolution. While common sense shows why this is true, detailed statistical analysis can verify this gut instinct.

Intelligent Design and Our Children

America has its current global dominance because of a commitment to education that has produced some of the most original and resourceful thinkers ever. Our children deserve to hear both sides of every controversy in order to think resourcefully and make informed decisions.

Unfortunately, materialistic atheists, posing as scientists, have aggressively fought against any mention of ID in the classroom. They have tried to curtail the rights of our children to hear the full story. Instead of taking part in an enlightened debate against their critics, today’s evolutionists simply try to sweep ID under the rug. Why? Because they realize that they have a broken theory, a theory that can’t explain everything.

The evolutionists’ flat denial that ID is a scientifically viable theory exposes how biology, and much of science, has become an ideology indistinguishable from religion itself. The first amendment of the US Constitution mandates a separation of church and state. The US Supreme Court has ruled numerous times that this separation applies to public schools. If school prayer is unconstitutional, then why have our biology classrooms been turned into an altar to the religion of science? The fact of the matter is that the constitution protects believers as well as non-believers. Teaching evolution alone breaks this balance.

What REAL Scientists are Saying about ID

While many people chose to ignore ID and blindly followed the failed doctrine of Darwin, biology’s leading scientists, hailing from major fundamentalist, Evangelical universities in the US, are saying:

“Intelligent design is posing questions that need to be asked and are being shut out of public debate.”
--Russell D. Moore, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

“Today, qualified scientists are reaching the conclusion that [intelligent] design theory makes better sense of the data [for such questions as] whether the DNA code is the result of natural causes or an intelligent agent.”
--Rep. Mark Souter, R-Ind., US House of Representatives

“The study of biological origins is fundamentally incomplete so long as intelligent design is removed from scientific discussion. More is true: evolutionary theory cannot be adequately understood apart from intelligent design as its proper foil and counterpart.”
--William A. Dembski, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

A Priori vs. A Posteriori: The Case for Redefining Science

Critics of ID have charged that it is not science because it relies on a priori reasoning instead of a posteriori reasoning. In a posteriori reasoning, knowledge is determined solely from empirical observations. A priori knowledge, on the other hand, does not originate directly from observation, but from abstract reason. Critics say that ID’s use of a nondenominational, intelligent designer to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of the origins of life, represents an a priori jump. Since science relies on a posteriori reasoning alone, they claim that ID is not science.

This is precisely why the ID movement is more meets they eye. Part of the effort is to fundamentally redefine science to include both a priori and a posteriori explanations of natural phenomena. The wild success of ID to fill the gaps in evolution is a prime example of how a priori evidence truly works in science. While the evolutionists have tried to turn “a priori” into a dirty catchphrase, mathematics and logic are actually based on this type of reasoning. Rather than shut out explanations purely for ideological reasons, intelligent design-advocates want to encourage new and creative explanations of the phenomena that surround us in nature.

What YOU Can Do
1.Learn more
The following sites have been approved by the Committee for Intelligent Action for their fair and balanced treatment of intelligent design:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design
http://www.ncseweb.org/
http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/
nhmag.html

2.Tell Your Friends
Unfortunately, most regular people today don’t have the time or interest to make science a part of their daily lives. As a result, many people don’t fully understand ID or the debate over evolution, and cannot make informed decisions or beliefs about it. YOU must spread the word.

3.Contact Your Local School Board Representative
Take action! Warn your local school board representative about the dangers in the ID controversy so they will take the right action when the time comes. That’s what they’re there for.

For more information, contact the Committee for Intelligent Action:

intelligentaction@hotmail.com

For my Portland Odyssey project for English, I had planned on interviewing homeless people at St. Francis dining hall in southeast, but I created a better idea while talking to my mother this afternoon. It is no secret that Portland proper falls very left of center on the political spectrum. I think the ratio of Kerry- to Bush-voters was about 3:1 in the city during the 2004 election. Everyone has also had experience with those pesky petitioners at Pioneer Square or in the Park Blocks. My idea is to gain a first-hand experience with the city's political psyche and its attitudes on political tolerance by pretending to petition for a radical conservative cause, like replacing evolution in schools with intelligent design, eliminating the property tax, eliminating welfare, etc. I'm not sure if this is entirely legal (a permit might be required), but I think I'm going to give it a go. It's an interesting way to examine the extent to which political tolerance is acceptable.

You might not be aware, but I receive upwards of 20 "comment-spams" per day. It is an incredible nuisance. To combat this problem, anyone who wishes to comment must obtain a free TypeKey account. It's very easy, simple, and free, so please don't stop commenting on account of not wanting to sign up. It also works for all weblogs using Movable Type and comment authentication. Send me an email if you have questions.

I realized today that it has rained every single day since I returned from Salt Lake City, and that I have only seen the sun twice (very briefly, I might add), in that same period. I think that I'm slowly going insane.

The results from the Pacific University Speech Tournament came in today. They were better than they were earlier in the year, but still not up to par. Carolyn Bacon obliterated the field in Dramatic Interp, obtaining the absolute, highest possible score. Her characterizations were truly stunning and unnerving. The freshmen debaters Marcus Robinson and James Ranney made it to quarterfinals in junior public debate, where they narrowly lost 2-1 with a bad topic. The Kadish-Anderson dynamo was a little disappointed to also only make it to quarterfinals, and also lose 2-1 on the same lame topic, in senior public debate. On the brighter side, I was ranked the 2nd best speaker out of something like 88 competitors in the senior public debate division. Jonathan was a just a few points behind, ranked 9th. Overall, we took 3rd as a school in our division. It's not as good as I think we can do, or should expect to do, but it's certainly a fine first step on the road to reclaim our glory.

In other news, I beat Ted in two showdown matches for the last spot on the single Science Bowl team. It is going to be really fun. The team is: Ari "Das Führer" Allen-Feuer, Carlin Kersch, Erik Werstler, Colin Corbett, and myself. This team is probably stronger than last year's B-team, which won an event at the national tournament in Washington DC.

Mock Trial is going really well so far, too. Not only are the people--other than me--on the A team some of the best people overall in Mock Trial, but they're some of the most fun too. As long as Beth doesn't bring up "Sex and the City" or "Desperate Housewives" too often, I'm quite happy. That's the only serious disadvantage of the skewed, 5:2 female to male gender raio. And who knows? We may even have a shot at going to the national tournament, if all the random factors fall our way.

It looks like Stoneman made the New York Times yet again, although this time for something moderately less innocent than his website that tried to trick viewers into believing a host of false facts.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/education/edlife/facebooks.html

My worst fears have materialized in the Academic All-Stars competition. A girl from Grant who co-authored a paper is also applying in science. The only way I have a chance of beating this kind of competition is by somehow making myself look like a sort of mad genius in the next five weeks. So far, I'm going to do a small stella project with Ms. Fisher. I just started typesetting equations for a mathematical derivation and written explanation of the Laplacian orbit determination method, which I am appending to my orbit determination project. I also have at least 50 pages of lab data from my cold fusion days two years ago. The only thing working particularly in my favor is my concentration in physics, which has the convenient reputation of being the most imposing and arrogant field of science. To the layman, there's nothing more forbidding than pages of multiple integrals, differential operators, and Greek with lots of dots and hats on top of it. As long as the veil of notation remains confounding enough, ordinary people will always confuse basic physics with the apex of brilliance. I just have to get my act seriously together if there is hope to compensate for my lack of scientific publications. The only good news I heard was that this potential competitor apparently (this has gone through the rumor mill) struggled in AP Chemistry. While Penk's class doesn't really follow the AP standards, the AP curriculum for Chemistry isn't terribly difficult. Hope is always justifiable until failure hits.

But the winner in the jest category - for sheer absurdity, economy, and unexpectedness - was submitted by David Herzog of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign:
"What's new?"
"E over h."

--from a PhysicsWeb article on the best physics humor

Extemp 1: Why the Canadian economy sucks.

Extemp 2: Foreign aid from Egypt? I think not.

Debate 1: Jonathan Kadish and I seemed to have the judge convinced that freedom of the press really does do more harm than good. Stupid constitution...

Debate 2: "Econodogs" Kadish and Anderson show that the economic principle of profit maximization, when marginal revenue equals marginal cost, obviously shows that we don't need to do anything about illegal immigration. Opponents claim that the justification for doing something about illegal immigration is that since the situation can be improved, we are obligated to improve it. By logical extension of that argument, since we can always improve the level of illegal immigration until there are no illegal immigrants, we should therefore reduce the number of illegal immigrants to 0. How's that for an efficient allocation of resources, eh?

Debate 3: --A brief sketch in quotes--
Scene: Adam and Jon arguing that the death penalty should be abolished in the US
Them, during prep time (according to Dan Szymkowiak and Alex Rodriguez): "Yeah, they'll probably throw some of that constitutional shit in our faces."

Their brilliance: "Our prison population is just going to keep growing and growing if we stop putting people to death. That's why we need the death penalty. This way we can just put people to death as new inmates fill our existing prisons."

Jon's lamo question: "Are you aware than more and more victims' families are actually starting to prefer life in prison over the death penalty?"
Opponent: "Are you aware that you're wrong?!"

Opponent (angrily shouting and waving his finger at me): "If I saw you killing my mother, I would chase you down and kill you!!" (made even more awkward by the fact that his mother was actually in the room at the time--no comment)

Adam, being wishy-washy after being scared out of his wits by psycho child above: "While their emotional appeal was eloquent, it doesn't really hold water. Once you're dead, you're dead!"

This round was amazingly weird. Our opponents were definitely of a conservative bent. True, Jon and I are flaming liberals with an occasional streak of economic conservatism, but I can respect certain aspects of conservatism when they're reasonable and logically developed (at least in a very abstract, theoretical sense). I have respect for the intelligent fiscal conservative, and I have some vague respect for various other conservative features too (not for radical evangelical conservatism, radical moral conservatism, dictatorial conservatism, warmongering conservatism, or any of the other idealogies polluting today's Republican party... I'm off the map now... Let's just forget about all that.). But I have no respect for wackos of any political persuasion, especially not ones who try to throw around conservative ideas without knowing what the heck they are saying. These people were definitely the wacko type. I'm sorry, but calling the constitution feces, even in conversation, or that death penalty is how we currently keep the prison population in check, is indicative of absolute insanity. It was definitely the classic sort of culture clash between the obnoxious liberal elitists (us) and the worst sort of stereotypical people, erroneously claiming to be Republicans, whose party affiliations would fit better in with the Third Reich than America.

Today was fun though. I think some people from the team threw their rounds so they could avoid finals tomorrow and go to winter formal. Jon and I are in for the long haul, though. I want to make his girlfriend as miserable as possible by blasting straight through the final round of debate and getting home at 10 PM tomorrow. Dan Szymkowiak, Kyle Stoneman, and Alex Rodgriguez are all on winter break, so they came and judged. It reminds me of how much more fun speech used to be.

This is an interesting mathematical diversion we skimmed in New Mexico last summer, but didn't thoroughly examine it. It's useful for many practical purposes, like figuring out who to marry.

http://plus.maths.org/issue3/puzzle/stopping/solution.html

Here's a very brief synopsis of the mock trial fact situation. Illegal street racing is popular in this town. There is a minor rivalry between two college students over this activity. A bunch of students, including these two go "caravanning" to this fast food restaurant. They stop at a light, one of the rivals drives up beside the other, and shouts that she wants to race. The light turns green, they both accelerate, the taunting student looses control of the car, crashes, and subsequently dies. The other car allegedly accelerates and then decelerates abruptly as the driver sees the crash. The student who doesn't crash--the one being taunted--is charged with second-degree manslaughter, or in the alternative, criminally negligent homicide. If this seems absurd, it's because I left out a few facts to simplify the description. There is an interesting testimony by an "expert" witness who gives his analysis of the situation by stating key speeds, times, distances, and accelerations. You can probably tell where this is going.

I read this testimony last night, and was utterly confused. It was clearly written by someone with absolutely no clue about physics whatsoever. My favorite passage is:

Parker Gallo's statement that Dana's vehicle crossed the intersection quickly would be consistent with a vehicle that is accelerating at a maximum velocity. We measure that velocity from zero to sixty miles per hour.

Moderately humorous, eh? But it gets better.

We were sitting at practice analyzing the case, when Kim Pelster made some idiotic comment about how I should study the physics of the situation, making a really annoying jab at my interest in the subject, and surely trying to embarrass me in front of Judge Giles. Tonight I was reading over it all again and thought about it. While the thought of Kim being potentially right really bugged me, I decided to crunch the numbers anyway--for the sake of the team.

Based on the incompetent information in the testimony, one can calculate two completely conflicting estimates for the cars velocity. The car's top acceleration is 0-60mph in 7s, which equals about 12.6ft/s². Using the two conflicting velocities, some the expert's other estimates, and my favorite of Zaraza's "sacred laws of motion" (v_f² + v₀² = 2aΔx) one can calculate that the car was either accelerating at about 5.9 ft/s or would have had to have travelled about 50% farther than it actually did. We can toss out the second conclusion as bogus. This means that the car would have had to have accelerated at less than half of its maximum, indicating that the driver was clearly not trying to race. It also suggests that this witness for the prosecution is completely incompetant, also furthering the case of the defense.

The only potentially serious assumption that I believe I'm making is that of constant acceleration. I think it is reasonable, though, because the car only travels a total of 135 feet before stopping. Since there was a quarter mile before the next stop in traffic, I think it makes sense to assume that a rational driver would accelerate fairly constantly under these circumstances, whether racing or driving normally. The driver would want to get up to full speed, which would probably take more than a hundred feet in either situation. Furthermore, witnesses on both sides agree that the car's accelerator pedal became stuck. We know that it was depressed in some degree the whole time, at least until the moment of braking.

I guess it's okay for Kim Pelster to have a good idea just this once. The irony is worth it.

While I may have been cheated out of a spot on the top science bowl team, it seems that I have done the cheating on the team assignments for mock trial. I won't lie; I was very pleased with my performance at the Mini Mock in December, which surpassed my best expectations. This, however, was probably because my expectations were rather low in the first place. Granted, there are a lot of incompetant people in mock trial, but there are also a handful of very, very good ones--far better than me, and with far more experience too. The good people, when at the bottom of their game, are much better than me at the top of mine. Since the top competitive team is composed of seven people, I figured that I was realistically destined to receive a relatively important role in the second team. Alas, it was not meant to be, for Beth Ford and I are the lawyers on the first team. Murphy probably gave one of his exaggerated dissertations about me to the attorneys.

This seems a little unfair for all the obvious reasons (i.e. other people are probably better qualified, and so on), but it also means that if I mess up, the team is pretty much toast. From my limited experience, lawyering in mock trial is one of those depressingly capricious tasks, in which success is probably more determined by uncontrollable factors: the judge, the case, the jury, etc. No matter how good you get--and one can only get so good--a significant part of the competition is a bitter, stochastic soup.

It is no more! I've given up. I realized that Colin's last criticism is absolutely correct: I have a strong logical basis support for a compromise between absolutism and nihilism, which obviously seems to be relativism. But that's what we have already accepted, more or less by default.

My true problem has always been that moral relativism falls to the same arguments that kill nihilism. Under moral relativism, the intrinsic value of an action depends not only on the context in which it is made, but the perspective of who is making it. The only real difference between a morally relativistic system and a nihilistic one is that while nihilism says that actions have no intrinsic value, moral relativism says that they do. But moral relativism gives no clue as to how to gauge this value so that we can say, option A is better than option B. Our end conclusion is simply based on a set of arbitrary guidelines that we try to follow.

The problem is that being able to make definitive decisions like: option A is better than option B, cannot be made (here I'm postulating) without having absolutes. After all, we are trying to make a definite (absolute in a sense?) statment. But absolutes result in contradiction. It's a paradox.

The only reason we survive without destroying ourselves in our decision making is because we have a primative set of instinct-morals. My idea was to build off that, making the assumption that the intrinsic value of a decision should be measured by the benefit it has for the human species, recognizing our own personal preservation is beneficial in someway for the larger evolutionary purpose (so as to justify some amount of self-interest). Presumably our instinct-morals are somehow built around the idea that we should make decisions to benefit some combination of humanity and ourselves. Natural selection seeks to do this, so it makes sense that natural selection would also seek to preserve instinct-morals that also worked to preserve humans. But this principle is just as arbitrary as anything else, and doesn't succeed in resolving the paradox at all. Hence, I'm giving up, at least temporarily, to spend time on things that aren't quite so hopeless.

Ted, can I borrow the textbook you used in Linear Algebra last term? Or at least tell me the title, and I might be able to pick it up at the Lewis and Clark library.

I'm writing this Oratory that disparages moral systems with absolutes, and I uncovered an interesting paradox. Consider the golden rule:

Do unto others as you would like done unto you.

Let's first assume that you are using the golden rule for your decision making. Here's a situation: You're a government official in Washington DC and it pretty much a certainty that terrorists will attack the city with an atomic bomb, likily severely injuring you. You have a terrorist in Guantanamo who knows information that will allow you to stop the attack. If you torture him, there is a significant probability that he will give up the information (let's say your torture methods have worked extremely well in the past).

Under the golden rule, there are two possibilities. The first is unrealistic: you like being tortured. We can discount this possibility because it's too absurd for a rational person (after seeing the analysis of the other option, you can work this one out for yourself).

The other, realistic, solution is that you are adverse to physical pain and torture. So you don't torture the terrorist and you are permanently maimed and mutated by the nuclear bomb. Knowing that this outcome would result when you made the decision, implies that you actually do enjoy being tortured (at least more than you like disobeying the golden rule). Already we have reached a contradiction, but it becomes even more ridiculous if we go one step further. Since we have established that you want to be tortured by not wanting to be tortured, it is your moral obligation under the golden rule to torture others. So, you torture the terrorist.

At the very least, what you want for yourself is at odds with your personal fate under the golden rule's prescribed action, leading to an indeterminant outcome. At the worst, you get the absolute worst-case scenario, where everyone suffers.

Despite my criticism of Penk's decision to teach organic chemistry to high school students that really don't have the sufficient background to truly learn it, I finally now understand trans fats. Monounsaturated and polyunsaturated (the healthier ones) fats have a number of double bonds in the fatty acids, whose hydrogens are in a cis configuration. The partial hydrogenation process (infusing hot hydrogen gas through the fat in the presence of a catalyst) adds hydrogens to the chains by dismantling some of the double bonds, and it also converts the cis configuration to the trans configuration (hence the name, I guess). Somehow (which I don't entirely understand), this makes them able to pack closer together and have a lower melting point. I think that since there are only two hydrogens attached to the double bonded carbons instead of four with a single bond, there is a higher degree of mobility in the bond. This additional mobility, I presume, means that the molecules are more irregular and can't pack as closely. Hence, they have the lower melting point. A basic, but informative site on the structure of various fats:

http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/F/Fats.html

Looks like it's the new year, or something like that. I had some fun with fireworks in the cold, damp fog. Everyone was sober. An above average New Years Eve.