I've been trying to write this post of more than a week but have failed several times. I was trying to link it to the evolution thread and the Proselytizers thread. However, as time passes and the emotional arder fades it is becoming harder and harder to reconnect to the emotional color of the moment.
Though evolution is well esablished scientific theory, which is more like what we call a fact than what what is known in common parlance as a theory, many people still reject it. Often times this rejection is rooted in some sort of notion of identity. When our brains develop to the point where they have the complexity to have the kind of self awareness that recognizes self and distinguishes self from other, very shortly there after we begin building our identity. This process of constructing an identity can be observed in children. Three major questions of identity are: Who am I, Where did I come from and Where do I fit into the world. Traditionally, these question of identity have been answered by religion. The answers to those three questions are some of the "truths" that are considered divinely revealed. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the answers run along the lines of: "You are the child of God", "From Adam & Eve", and the "plan of God is as follows...". I think that one of the appeals of religion is that it provides answers to these questions quickly and without much thought. People can quickly have their need for answers satisfied by people anxious to bring them into the fold.
Evolution as a concept, strikes deeply at these pat answers of identity. It forces people to completely reunderstand themselves. They are forced to give up a big portion of their identity, who they think that they are, and accept a different concept. This is a huge step and far beyond what most people are able to deal with in adulthood. Having been there and having done that, I consider it one of my greatest accomplishments of my adult life. It was a lonely painful process. However, looking back I feel as though this was a transformation much like a catepillar turning into a moth. My personal metaphore for this process was borrowed from the place that I lived at the time, Santa Cruz.
In Santa Cruz their is often marine fog and it is grey overcast. Under this fog, you can see for miles but you have a ceiling that blocks out the light from the sun and often the stars. However, I would fly out of the airport near Santa Cruz, climb into the fog (which is a disorienting experience that I had to train hard to be able to handle well effectively), and then I would pop out of the top of the marine layer and there around me would be glorious sun. It would be a beautiful clear day and my vision was unlimited by the clouds. At night I could see all the way to the stars. That is the way I feel now. Now that I've popped out of the layer of clouds, I can see farther than I ever imagined and things that were once hidden from me, obscured by the clouds, are now open to me.
Tuesday, January 9, 2007
Saturday, January 6, 2007
Pleasanton Cycling Routes Vol.1 Mines & Del Valle
Along time ago when google maps first came out I asked for a feature. The ability to construct routes through via points. I know that I'm not the only one that ever asked for this feature but I am one of the happiest that they implemented it. It allows me to easily make cycling routes and make them available online. I'm going to try publish some of my cycling routes.
This one is the easy route. It is 21.2 mi:
Main Street Pleasanton to Tesla & Mines Road Livermore
This one is a bit longer, 28.2 miles, it goes to the base of Del Valle hill. Mines road is a slightly sloped up:
Main Street to the base of Del Valle Hill
The real route is Del Valle Hill. It is only a couple miles longer, 31.4 miles but it includes a lot more climbing:
To the top of Del Valle Hill That paricular hill is used by local cyclists to keep tabs on their fitness. They keep track of their times from the sign at the bottom which is also marked with a ribbon to the top where there begins a curb which is painted yellow on the end.
If you are ambitious, you can do both sides which is 36.2mi:
Main Street and both sides of Del Valle Hill Most cyclists stop at the guard shack most of the way down the hill but I like going a bit farther and crossing the bridge. There is a good reason to do both sides of the hill if you can hack it. It is one thing to do one big effort but it is totally another to be able to ration your energy such that you can do a hill like that twice. Thankfully, the back side isn't quite as steep and the turns aren't bad so you can really descend at speed.
A slightly different ride is not going up Del Valle but rather going up Mines Road. Though the hill is less steep than Del Valle but it is much longer. It climbs quite a bit but then levels out at about 2200'. You don't have to go all the way to the top. You can turn around anywhere that you want on the hill, but a good place to stop is a small bar/cafe called the junction:
Main Street to the Junction Admittedly the full ride is much more challenging than any of the others, it includes a lot of climbing and it is 77 miles. There is a lot of good things about this ride, including the fact that it is the beginning of many more longer rides. However, there are some downsides to it. A few of the residents on Mines rd. don't seem to like cyclists very much and there isn't any water between the little park at Holmes & Whetmore and the Junction.
Finally the route that I want to work myself into shape to do is this one:
Full Mines Patterson Tesla loop
This one is the easy route. It is 21.2 mi:
Main Street Pleasanton to Tesla & Mines Road Livermore
This one is a bit longer, 28.2 miles, it goes to the base of Del Valle hill. Mines road is a slightly sloped up:
Main Street to the base of Del Valle Hill
The real route is Del Valle Hill. It is only a couple miles longer, 31.4 miles but it includes a lot more climbing:
To the top of Del Valle Hill That paricular hill is used by local cyclists to keep tabs on their fitness. They keep track of their times from the sign at the bottom which is also marked with a ribbon to the top where there begins a curb which is painted yellow on the end.
If you are ambitious, you can do both sides which is 36.2mi:
Main Street and both sides of Del Valle Hill Most cyclists stop at the guard shack most of the way down the hill but I like going a bit farther and crossing the bridge. There is a good reason to do both sides of the hill if you can hack it. It is one thing to do one big effort but it is totally another to be able to ration your energy such that you can do a hill like that twice. Thankfully, the back side isn't quite as steep and the turns aren't bad so you can really descend at speed.
A slightly different ride is not going up Del Valle but rather going up Mines Road. Though the hill is less steep than Del Valle but it is much longer. It climbs quite a bit but then levels out at about 2200'. You don't have to go all the way to the top. You can turn around anywhere that you want on the hill, but a good place to stop is a small bar/cafe called the junction:
Main Street to the Junction Admittedly the full ride is much more challenging than any of the others, it includes a lot of climbing and it is 77 miles. There is a lot of good things about this ride, including the fact that it is the beginning of many more longer rides. However, there are some downsides to it. A few of the residents on Mines rd. don't seem to like cyclists very much and there isn't any water between the little park at Holmes & Whetmore and the Junction.
Finally the route that I want to work myself into shape to do is this one:
Full Mines Patterson Tesla loop
Thursday, January 4, 2007
Proselytizers (part 2)
One of the things that the proselytizers and I immediately disagreed about was evolution. Back a long time ago, when I was a Christian one of the scriptures that really spoke to me was the verse out of the Psalms which said: "The heaven's God's glory do declare and the sky his handiwork teach." I really saw God's hand in all of creation. As I looked around the world, I saw a carefully balanced and designed system. Then one day while I was on a religious retreat, I was reading a book and something I read was like pulling a string on a knit garmet causing the whole thing unravel. I remember the exact moment when that string was pulled. I was reading a book that had absolutely nothing to do with the Bible, or biology. It was a book on artificial life, a sub-topic of artificial intelligence, of all things. It really didn't have anything to do with any of the bounds that normally shape the debate regarding evolutionary theory and creationism. The thing that really impacted on my thinking was a discussion regarding emergent behavior.
My thinking before that point had been something like, the physics of the world show that there is ever increasing entropy. I believed that because things tended toward disorder, and there was ample order in front of me. Some intelligence must have not too distantly put things in order. The chapter in the artificial life book on self organizing systems and how they can lead to emergent phenomena shook that belief to its core. I think before that moment, I had never seen or even heard of any natural situation where order spontaneously arose. This chapter about emergent phenomena gave ample examples in many domains where things self organized. It turns out that in many cases, when energy is applied to a disordered system, it orders itself. A simple example is if you mix up some sand and rocks in a bowl and then shake it, the rocks seem to magically float to the top. I was familiar with many of these self organizing systems but never realized the implications of them. I guess that I really didn't ever consider the scope of the "system" in my notion of the second law of themodynamics. Our planet is constantly receiving huge doses of new energy from the sun and from the heavy radioactive elements at the core of our planet undergoing fission. All that has energy been driving the open system toward more complexity and overcoming the entropy. Therefore, the 2nd law of thermodynamics doesn't prove God's existance.
The realization that we live in an open system and that energy from the sun has been driving a very complicated self organizing system toward ever increasing complexity was the initial tug on the string that began unwinding my belief in God. One by one, the core beliefs that I had built my life around came crashing down. This process took me many years and was a kind of existentialistic crisis.
My thinking before that point had been something like, the physics of the world show that there is ever increasing entropy. I believed that because things tended toward disorder, and there was ample order in front of me. Some intelligence must have not too distantly put things in order. The chapter in the artificial life book on self organizing systems and how they can lead to emergent phenomena shook that belief to its core. I think before that moment, I had never seen or even heard of any natural situation where order spontaneously arose. This chapter about emergent phenomena gave ample examples in many domains where things self organized. It turns out that in many cases, when energy is applied to a disordered system, it orders itself. A simple example is if you mix up some sand and rocks in a bowl and then shake it, the rocks seem to magically float to the top. I was familiar with many of these self organizing systems but never realized the implications of them. I guess that I really didn't ever consider the scope of the "system" in my notion of the second law of themodynamics. Our planet is constantly receiving huge doses of new energy from the sun and from the heavy radioactive elements at the core of our planet undergoing fission. All that has energy been driving the open system toward more complexity and overcoming the entropy. Therefore, the 2nd law of thermodynamics doesn't prove God's existance.
The realization that we live in an open system and that energy from the sun has been driving a very complicated self organizing system toward ever increasing complexity was the initial tug on the string that began unwinding my belief in God. One by one, the core beliefs that I had built my life around came crashing down. This process took me many years and was a kind of existentialistic crisis.
Tuesday, January 2, 2007
Proselytizers(part 1)
A couple of Christan proselytizers came by my door this morning. I tried to give them fair warning. I told them right form the outset that I was a "militant atheist" but they really wanted to share their message with me and persisted in engaging me. When I was working for the campaign, they told us not to bother with people who strongly identified with a different viewpoint. That is why I said that to them when I saw their Bibles. At the campaign they said that you are not likely to be able to convince someone on their doorstep.
Anyway, it was they who persisted and I decided to go with it because it was a good opportunity for me to practice my arguments and debate technique. I think that they went away frustrated and disturbed. If I didn't think that religion was such threat to human existence, then I think that I would feel sorry for them, disturbing them like that. However, I know how hard it is to work up the effort to go door to door and talk to strangers. Maybe by giving them such an unpleasant experience, they will find it harder to go out and do it next time and the world will be saved, not from their supposed sins, but from irrational uncritical thought inherent in religion.
So the first thing that they asked me was why I consider myself a militant atheist. In their case, it may have come out more like, "why don't you believe". That is a fair question. For me that comes down to a rather philosophical question, the nature of truth and how you test a particular statement to see if it actually true, false, or one of the various flavors of unknown.
Without diving into the deep water of philosophy, there are observations and these constitute the facts that support or refute particular hypotheses. When a hypothesis is consistent with all observed facts then it can be considered to be true until the point when it is found to be inconsistent with a newly discovered fact. This hypothesis can then be called a theory. These theories can then provisionally be used as facts as long as it is understood that they subject to change at some point in the future.
This whole pyramid of reason is grounded on observations. There are a lot of caveats to observation and the resulting perception of the event which can lead to uncertainty. This is philosophical deep water and will probably end up being a blog entry some time in the future. Thus when it is very important to get things fairly close to correct the first time (as is the case with scientific truth) and not have things change too quickly due too poor observations or omitted observations, only a certain kind of observation is considered. The observation has to be made in such a way that it can be independently repeated. Many times this is done through setting up a controlled experiment. Theoretically, the experimental setup is clearly enough defined that someone other than the original observer can repeat the experiment and observe the exact same thing.
That last step is extremely important because it takes a personal experience which is very limited because it is only local to one person's experience and infuses it with a transcendent property. When a particular observation is repeatable, takes it from the realm of a personal experience and makes it something that is universally accessible. It transcends personal experience, and because it is universally accessible it can be considered a universally shared experience. You may not have personally made the observation but because you could theoretically repeat the experiment and have the experience yourself and make the same observation, you can consider it part of your own experience.
All of that above is thumbnail sketch of the philosophical basis for reason and science. It is the foundation of much of our knowledge.
So back to the proselytizers and my answer to their question, "why are you an atheist?" When you finally strip religion (all religion) down to its fundamentals, there is a revealed truth. How do you know that God exists? This fact was revealed to someone. How do you know the will of God? God reveals himself through his Holy Bible. Where did it come from? God inspired some people to write the scriptures down.. At the terminus of all of the questions such as this, is some form of revealed knowledge. I will unquestionably accept the fact the people had a personal experience that led them to believe that God had communicated something to them and they acted upon that. However, the thing about this that causes me to categorically reject revealed truth is the fact that those personal experiences never acquire the transcendence that elevates them from personal experiences to universally accessible experience. The fact that those experiences are unique events that happen only within the perception of an individual means that they can never be repeated. Without the ability to repeat the observation personally, I cannot ever accept that observation or experience as part of my own personal experience. I therefore cannot accept that observation as one of the facts on which I build my beliefs.
That, in a nutshell, why I'm an athiest.
Anyway, it was they who persisted and I decided to go with it because it was a good opportunity for me to practice my arguments and debate technique. I think that they went away frustrated and disturbed. If I didn't think that religion was such threat to human existence, then I think that I would feel sorry for them, disturbing them like that. However, I know how hard it is to work up the effort to go door to door and talk to strangers. Maybe by giving them such an unpleasant experience, they will find it harder to go out and do it next time and the world will be saved, not from their supposed sins, but from irrational uncritical thought inherent in religion.
So the first thing that they asked me was why I consider myself a militant atheist. In their case, it may have come out more like, "why don't you believe". That is a fair question. For me that comes down to a rather philosophical question, the nature of truth and how you test a particular statement to see if it actually true, false, or one of the various flavors of unknown.
Without diving into the deep water of philosophy, there are observations and these constitute the facts that support or refute particular hypotheses. When a hypothesis is consistent with all observed facts then it can be considered to be true until the point when it is found to be inconsistent with a newly discovered fact. This hypothesis can then be called a theory. These theories can then provisionally be used as facts as long as it is understood that they subject to change at some point in the future.
This whole pyramid of reason is grounded on observations. There are a lot of caveats to observation and the resulting perception of the event which can lead to uncertainty. This is philosophical deep water and will probably end up being a blog entry some time in the future. Thus when it is very important to get things fairly close to correct the first time (as is the case with scientific truth) and not have things change too quickly due too poor observations or omitted observations, only a certain kind of observation is considered. The observation has to be made in such a way that it can be independently repeated. Many times this is done through setting up a controlled experiment. Theoretically, the experimental setup is clearly enough defined that someone other than the original observer can repeat the experiment and observe the exact same thing.
That last step is extremely important because it takes a personal experience which is very limited because it is only local to one person's experience and infuses it with a transcendent property. When a particular observation is repeatable, takes it from the realm of a personal experience and makes it something that is universally accessible. It transcends personal experience, and because it is universally accessible it can be considered a universally shared experience. You may not have personally made the observation but because you could theoretically repeat the experiment and have the experience yourself and make the same observation, you can consider it part of your own experience.
All of that above is thumbnail sketch of the philosophical basis for reason and science. It is the foundation of much of our knowledge.
So back to the proselytizers and my answer to their question, "why are you an atheist?" When you finally strip religion (all religion) down to its fundamentals, there is a revealed truth. How do you know that God exists? This fact was revealed to someone. How do you know the will of God? God reveals himself through his Holy Bible. Where did it come from? God inspired some people to write the scriptures down.. At the terminus of all of the questions such as this, is some form of revealed knowledge. I will unquestionably accept the fact the people had a personal experience that led them to believe that God had communicated something to them and they acted upon that. However, the thing about this that causes me to categorically reject revealed truth is the fact that those personal experiences never acquire the transcendence that elevates them from personal experiences to universally accessible experience. The fact that those experiences are unique events that happen only within the perception of an individual means that they can never be repeated. Without the ability to repeat the observation personally, I cannot ever accept that observation or experience as part of my own personal experience. I therefore cannot accept that observation as one of the facts on which I build my beliefs.
That, in a nutshell, why I'm an athiest.
Monday, January 1, 2007
Suunto T4 first impression
I have to admit that I'm a gadget junkie. I got my wife the Suunto T4 today. I already have too many heart rate monitors and training tools. I've already got the Garmin Forerunner 305, the Garmin Edge 305, and the Suunto T6 and I used to have the Garmin Forerunner 201, the Garmin Forerunner 301, the Polar A10, and the Suunto Advizor. I could't justify getting another one for myself, so I got it for her. ;-) I think that I've spend enough time with these to have a good understanding of the caveats of each one.
My hope with the T4 is that Suunto's Coach will provide her with a reasonablly well thought out workout schedule that she'll develop the consistency to keep with the program.
I think that the documentation that comes with the T4 is really bad. It needs to cover more of the key concepts that a person using the watch are likely to need to know to make use of the gadget's features. To be fair, the Sunnto training site does add quite a lot. The biggest problem is you need to kind of wrap your head around Suunto's way of doing things which is a bit different than most of the literature out there:
Things that are different than the Suunto T6:
My hope with the T4 is that Suunto's Coach will provide her with a reasonablly well thought out workout schedule that she'll develop the consistency to keep with the program.
I think that the documentation that comes with the T4 is really bad. It needs to cover more of the key concepts that a person using the watch are likely to need to know to make use of the gadget's features. To be fair, the Sunnto training site does add quite a lot. The biggest problem is you need to kind of wrap your head around Suunto's way of doing things which is a bit different than most of the literature out there:
- most literature talks about 5 HR zones. Suunto has 3.
- This is the MOST important thing to understand. Books about exercise and training think in terms of time@%HR. This really has been kind of the state of the art since HR monitors came out. The reality of it is that this doesn't actually represent a real workout. It is very hard to have that steady of a state. Suunto gets around this and introduces a new concept called training effect. If you make a graph of HR on the Y axis and time on the X axis. Training effect is the area under the curve. The great thing about the Suunto products is that they handle non-steady state workouts.
Things that are different than the Suunto T6:
- Unlike the T6 which comes with a cable which you can connect to your PC using the provided USB cable the T3 & T4 can't communicate with a PC and you can't download the data unless you have a PC-POD.
- Unlike the T6, the T3 & T4 don't record every beat of your heart. They just record the summary from your workout. Even if you have the PC-POD you can't see what your heart was at any given point during a workout. This might not matter to some people but it will matter to some.
- The T4 only stores the previous 15 workouts in its internal logbook. If you want a long term storage of your data you must buy the PC-POD so that you can download your data to the computer.
- The T4 doesn't seem to have an altimeter like the T6.
- There doesn't seem to be a provision for multiple bikes. This won't be a problem for my wife but I personally have three bikes, a road bike, a TT/Tri bike, and a mountain bike. You sort of need to be able to pair multiple bike PODs to the T4.
- As my sport is triathlon, the T4 seems to be missing some features that are needed for triathlon. For example the ability divide a workout into segments like swim, T1, bike, T2, and run or even just bike, T, run for a brick workout. You can do some of this with a lap timer but it really doesn't break the data down as nicely as you would like. However, this limitation shouldn't affect my wife who isn't competitive and won't need this feature.
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