I have no idea for a post

This post is largely free of any intellectual content whatsoever. I just dropped by and noticed "wow, it's sure been a long time since I last posted!" So I figured I'd just type something out, stream of consciousness style, edit lightly, and hit the orange button.

It has long been an observation of mine that when my friends acquire girlfriends, the vast majority of their free time disappears. "Fascinating," I thought, "girlfriends appear to eat nearly all of one's free time." Then, somewhat to my surprise, I found myself girlfriended, and surely enough, the vast majority of my free time immediately evaporated. "Where did it go?" I wonder to myself, sometimes. I'll have to ask her if she knows.

I'm going to go and help a coworker move tomorrow. If anyone would like to come along and help, I could use the help. Since he's moving within the Salt Lake valley, I plan to also spend some time in Salt Lake, possibly acquiring chocolate and/or Ikea furniture. These are both things which are more interestingly obtained in Salt Lake.

Badly spoken English is something of a pet peeve of mine. For some reason, this seems to hold true even when the English is, strictly speaking, French. I present this specimen: voila. This French word means something like "look there!" It is often accompanied by pointing. The problem is that, in the hands of non-French speakers, this word is frequently mutated into "viola," a pleasant but totally unrelated musical instrument. Today, I actually heard someone SAY viola when they MEANT voila. I winced.

Thus, I invent this rhyme:

I before O is played with a bow,
but swap them around to show what you've found.

Perhaps you can think of a better one. My brother once told me about an online text-adventure game he played, in which one could find a character called "the ghost of the English language." The ghost could confer upon you the power to use the public chat channels, but before it did so would give you a quiz about proper English usage. Players were not allowed to speak on the chat channels until they had achieved a full 100% score on the quiz, which they could take as many times as they liked. When one succeeded at the quiz, the ghost would say "now go forth, and avenge my death!"

That is all.

Greetings, oh vast public.

Ever had one of those nights where you don't sleep much so you end up falling asleep really early the next day and then you wake up around 10 PM and you can't sleep at all the following night? Yeah, me too. And since I've completely run out of RSS feeds to read, web-sites to visit, e-mails to respond to, missionaries to write to, and web games to update, I have resorted to the bottom of the barrel, and you are getting a blog update.

The photo-shopped church sign, by the way, is mine. I don't know if I've posted it before, but I liked the result so I've had it sitting on my desktop for ages. If it made you smile in vague amusement then it has done its job.

Speaking of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I'm a regular Kiva user. I have a hundred or so dollars which I regularly flip through their loaning machine, and which is used to provide small loans to entrepreneurs who are trying to create a livelihood (usually in other countries, but sometimes in poorer parts of the U.S.). Kiva allows users to count their loans toward teams, and maintains a ranking of which teams are providing the most loans. "Kiva Mormons," the team which I usually count toward, is just a handful of loans behind the "Flying Spaghetti Monster" team, and there's some competition to try and recruit more people so that we can pull ahead.

There have been some people in the team that worry that competitiveness is not a good motivation for charitable work. This got me thinking, especially since I heard of this verse in the Koran:

For every one of you [Jews, Christians, Muslims], We have appointed a path and a way. If God had willed, He would have made you but one community; but that [He has not done in order that] He may try you in what has come to you. So compete with one another in good works.

I think "compete with one another in good works" is a great way for religions to relate to one another. If you believe you are God's true church, make an argument with deeds rather than words. I can also think of a nod to this in Christianity:

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.

This is more advice for those who are trying to discern true religion from false, but it's also a reminder to those of us who call ourselves the true religion -- we ought to be producing good fruit. So yes, I think that competing in good works has a sound basis. And with that, just 93 more loans to pass the spaghetti people!

Height = prosperity

I found this article a while back, and thought it would be fun to share. It has some relevance to my earlier post about health care--specifically, how do you measure the quality of a country's health care? In short, one answer is "measure how tall they are."

Differences in height between two people living in the same society are due to genetic differences. However, the difference between the average height of populations is due to the quality of life in each society. Height is strongly affected by a combination of nutrition, disease, and environmental stress; thus, societies with lower quality of life will be, on average, shorter. When I was first reading the article, I was a bit skeptical; it seems like there would be other factors that matter. However, you'll find that most of these have been considered, and the premise still works very well: height = prosperity.

One interesting point is that Americans used to be the tallest people in the world. It was true around the time of the revolutionary war, and our height gradually increased all the way into the 1950's. However, something happened around then -- the average European heights kept increasing, while ours stayed pretty much the same. The average European is now significantly taller than we are. Sure, we win out on average income, but it's not translating into a lifestyle that makes us taller. The biggest contrast is in the Netherlands; we are 3-4 inches shorter than the average Dutch person (average height for men and women are 6'1" and 5'8" respectively; for Americans, it's about 5'10" and 5'5"). This is comparing American Caucasians to European Caucasians; if you include our immigrants, the difference increases by another inch.

The full article is here, and summarizes a lot of neat studies. I loved the study about serving the World War 2 rations of corned beef and cabbage for school lunches. It's a fun read, so enjoy it :).

Holiday specials and tacos

There's an hilarious xkcd post about bad movies in general and the Star Wars holiday special in particular. "How," I wondered, "could anything possibly be that bad?" So I asked YouTube.

At first, I stared in disbelief. Then, I started laughing. Then, from the deep recesses of my soul, some tortured voice started calling out: "What are they doing?" it said. "This isn't right!" it said. "Make it stop, please make it stop!" it cried. So I closed the browser window, hoping that some vestige of my sanity remained.

I had watched for very slightly more than 60 seconds.

In other news, I went to Taco Riendo in south Provo (it's one of those cursed restaurant buildings that can't make up its mind -- the genealogy so far is Wingers->Tandoori Grill->Taco Riendo). It was really good -- I'm hopeful that it might hang on. So far I've only had the tacos ($1.59 each--you get a soft corn tortilla, a pile of meat, and free access to the taco fillings bar). It has very little in common with Taco Bell, which is a good thing. I also got a piece of flan, being that I am a sucker for flan, and it was really good. It dwells somewhere between custard and cheesecake.

Zeno's paradox

One of the more famous Greek puzzles is called "Zeno's paradox," named after the philosopher who conceived it. The problem goes something like this:

"Achilles, the great warrior, was to compete in a footrace with a tortoise. Because Achilles is so much faster, the tortoise was given a large head start. Supposing that Achilles started 100 meters behind, and is ten times faster than the tortoise--well, he should run 100 meters, but in that time the tortoise has moved 10. So Achilles runs another 10 meters, but in that time, the tortoise has pulled ahead by 1. So he runs 1 meter, but in that time, the tortoise has stayed ahead by a tenth of a meter. As he runs a tenth, the tortoise holds his lead by a hundredth. Achilles must cover an infinite number of such smaller distances; and since no mortal can complete an infinite number of things, surely it is impossible for him to catch the tortoise!"

It's an interesting paradox. The thing that's so interesting about it, however, is that it also has quite a simple solution. To begin, this paradox tells a lie: "No mortal can complete an infinite number of things." But if the infinite number of things is ever smaller and smaller, then sometimes we mortals can do precisely that. Suppose I try to solve this problem first:

"I wish to sum up all of the distances which Achilles will travel: First the hundred meters, then then 10, then the 1, then the tenth, then the hundredth, and so on, forever. How large a number shall I have when I am done?"

Well, the answer will look very much like this:

111.11111111111111...

except of course that the string of ones shall go on forever. But this number is not infinite. In fact, consider the decimal representation of 111 and 1/9 (one-hundred-eleven and one-ninth). If you do the long division, you will soon realize that it is 111 followed by an endless string of 1's after the decimal point. Thus, the sum of the earlier infinite series is precisely 111 and 1/9 meters, which is the point in the race where Achilles will pass the tortoise.

And there you go: How to answer Zeno's paradox. I hope I said it clearly enough.

Debating Health Care (Poorly)

I've been hearing a lot about the state of health care in the United States. Since I have some strong opinions in this area, I present you with my own rant on the topic.

Before digging in, I wish to start with a little bit of Chinese history. Fifty years ago, Mao Zedong started introducing a series of agricultural reforms to the new agricultural communes in China. These reforms were unscientific and had not been tested; grain production dropped by nearly a quarter over the next three years. To avoid government anger, officials would exaggerate their productivity in their official reports, which in turn led the government to requisition too much grain for state projects. This cycle of deception led to the deaths of tens of millions of people by starvation--comparable to the entire body count of World War 2.

Much of the grain taken by the state was being routed to work crews building massive infrastructure--dams, canals, and so forth. Unfortunately, many of these were so poorly designed and constructed that they turned out worthless. Many trained engineers had been disqualified from the work because Mao Zedong had ideological problems with them.

Mao's successor in the communist party was named Deng Xiaoping. Deng Xiaoping abandoned many of the communist economic theories and moved China toward a comparatively capitalist system. Defending this, he said "I don't care if it's a white cat or a black cat. It's a good cat so long as it catches mice." He had been forced out of power during Mao's lifetime due to his willingness to apply market economics to China's problems. After Mao's death, he returned to prominence, and is the architect of much of modern China's prosperity. Deng Xiaoping advocated seeking truth from facts. And this is what I feel is often missing from health care debates: People make emotional or ideological arguments, with no reference to actual facts about health care.

A handful have claimed there is no need for reform. Sen. Shelby (R-Ala) claimed that Obama would destroy "the best health care system the world has ever known." Of course, he is already on government health care, so I'm not sure how to interpret that. Still, what does he mean that it's the best health care in the world? How do you even measure that? The two most obvious measures that come to mind are:

1. What is our life expectancy?
2. What is our infant mortality rate?

The problem is that the United States does badly on both of these measures. And it's not just a problem of having a large population: Japan, Canada, the United Kingdom, and France are crushing us soundly, and all have 50+ million populations.

While some of the difference is probably the poor American diet and activity levels, how do you explain the infant mortality rate? Infants all weigh pretty nearly the same amount. Besides, the problems with our health care can be measured in a host of other ways (error rate, amount of preventive care, etc.), and we fare poorly on these measures as well. There's an article linked at the end if you want some actual numbers.

There's been a lot of ideological name-calling. Claiming that health care reform is evil because it is "socialist" is an attempt to evoke the ideological red scare of yesteryear. The fact is, most of the health care systems that are destroying us on efficiency, outcomes, and access to care are socialized systems. Is it okay for more of us to die or get sick so that politicians can score points? Or do you believe that America will implement socialized health care more poorly than other countries which have done it? Why do you believe we are less competent than they are?

Some believe that government always performs poorly compared to the private market. What is this argument based on? Do you believe private mercenaries would do better than our army? Do you believe a network of private toll roads would be preferable to the Interstate system? Do you believe that the heavy government price regulation of our water, sewage, and electrical systems has resulted in poor delivery of these services? The truth is that government does certain things better than private industry, and this is a well studied issue in economics. Further, health care run fully by the government has been tried and tested dozens of times in dozens of places, and many of them are healthier than we are. It's not an automatic failure.

I think there's a hidden issue behind this hatred of government programs. American social programs are usually directed at the poor. The middle class gets taxed to pay for these things, but we don't see the benefit. I agree that this is genuinely unfair. We don't resent roads because we all see the benefit from roads. We don't resent national parks because we can all visit them. We don't resent the military because the military defends everybody. I think that a basic level of health care should also be available to everybody, however that is accomplished. I think that there'll be a fair amount of bellyaching tell it gets passed, but as long as the benefits hit everyone, we'll shortly be wondering how we lived without it.

Finally, I refer you to someone who's done a lot more research than I have. This article is much longer than this post, but is backed by a great deal more research. You may not like its conclusions, but if you wish to contradict them, do so with actual facts. Please don't fight back using pure ideology. Because if there's one point I hope I made at the beginning of this post, it's that the cost of clinging to ideology in spite of reality is measured in human lives.

We ran out of candy

It's a little late, but are some random snippets about the Halloween party.

Nearly everyone showed up late. Most of the food did, eventually, get eaten (and the barbecue turned out amazingly well), but it was more a trickle through the evening rather than a big munchfest.

Seriously, the barbecue was great. I still need to figure out a safe way to use a charcoal grill on my balcony. I put a tarp down just in case, and it ended up with small holes burnt in it. Scary. I used a sauce called "Soy Vey" for the marinade (this is what happens when Jewish people marry Chinese people), and it was really good. Just wow. I think you need to grill over hot charcoal to get the full effect, though.

A few people dressed up as rock stars. I wore solid black (I wanted some depressing jewelry, but couldn't find anything I liked). Kim probably wins best costume, though Ismail also made a good shot at it. Curt & Shana showed up nicely costumed, though they didn't go for the rock star thing. Mary gets an honorable mention :).

We played quite a lot of Rock Band. This was the point of the party, and it was entertaining. Thanks to Ismail for bringing the Beatles edition. It was good variety!

Apple crisp with cream on top is delicious. I should purchase some method of whipping cream.

I had a veritable horde of children descend upon my home. This is a refreshing change from the last few years up in Orem, when I didn't see a single child. Nathan and I knew we'd probably get more trick-or-treaters this year, so we purchased four large bags of candy. Ismail also donated a bag of Mexican candies, so there really was a lot. No matter -- the doorbell rang every few minutes for an hour or so, and we were completely out of candy by seven o'clock. It was kind of embarrassing, though no one played any tricks (that I know of...). Next year, we shall buy TEN pounds of candy. Crazy kids and their insane sugar requirements!

Congratulations on the mission call!