The problem with the simplest conceptions and refutations of free will is that if determinism is true, then free will is pretty much false.

And if free will is based on quantum randomness etc. then that really isn’t free will. It’s just stochastic happenstance.

Perhaps we should turn it around and examine the very loaded words and ideas themselves of “free will.”

I cluck my tongue at fowl language.

The amount that math is actually used in any job vs. how very much it’s stressed in school is hugely disparate.

Judging by what teachers say, 99% of jobs use calculus 80% of the day, when in reality less than 10% of jobs make much use of math at all, and then it’s typically only simple arithmetic. It’s mostly scientists who use any higher math in a serious way, and even then it’s restricted to tiny areas necessary to perform their work.

It’s important for most people to jump over the seemingly-endless useless math hurdles to achieve other goals, but as far as actually being necessary?

Nope.

In a way, I am glad many of my family and peers liked to remind me early and often that I’d be a failure, and that I was essentially innately terrible.

Without that, I never would’ve had the impetus to escape Lake City, to do the wild and wonderful things I’ve done in my life, and I never would’ve been successful beyond even the remotest imaginings of my teenage mind.

So thank you, people, for treating me like utter trash. Tuns out this detritus floats in your cesspool, crystallizes in the dry air into something strong and unyielding, then blows away in the zephyr to a much better place.

After some hassling, some folks from AT&T finally came out to bury the fiber that they’d run through our yard for their fiber-to-the-door service. It was previously just exposed on the ground as the install is separate from the bury.

The service itself has been great, by the way, especially as compared to the merged Time Warner and Cox — now called “Spectrum” — which went down 20+ times a day and did so for weeks on weeks. Hence, why we switched.

But I wanted to observe that several of the workers who did the bury had prison tattoos.

Good on AT&T for hiring ex-cons. I was glad to see that.

Being convicted of a crime doesn’t mean that you should never have a job again. Not sure how we ever got to that state as a society.

Oh wait, yes I do: under capitalism, producing superfluous people is kind of part of how it functions.

It’s unsurprising that nearly all the greatest scientists and mathematicians — Shannon, Einstein, Noether, Curie, etc. — took a deep interest in the arts and humanities.

Unlike most STEM folks, the truly great thinkers did not shun but rather embraced the “soft” subjects that are seen as unworthy and terrible by the typically STEM-infected.

Claude Shannon loved poetry; Einstein thought this; Emmy Noether loved dancing; Curie followed the works of actors, directors and choreographers.

There’s always been something of a separation of the arenas and I agree with Snow that the humanities types should learn some science and math (at least concepts), but it’s only been relatively recently that the STEM types have declared the humanities utterly unworthy of study with no possible lessons to be imparted there.

Of course the revenge is that the best scientists and thinkers are usually those who are well-versed in or at least interested in many different fields.

Nobel laureates were significantly more likely to engage in arts and crafts avocations than Royal Society and National Academy of Science members, who were in turn significantly more likely than Sigma Xi members and the U.S. public.

This does not surprise me in the least. If you can only think about one thing, you cannot think about much.

The strangest thing about buying a rare car is the dealership knew nothing about it, the salespeople didn’t either — and the funniest part: I was talking to a person who actually works with all this makers’ cars and she’d also never heard of it.

To understand why, this car maker typically sells in six days one of their more popular models what the one I bought sells in an entire year. (Actually more like 5.75 days.)

It’s just a little weird dealing with the manufacturer of the car and they are like, “Never heard of it.”

And I’m like, “You made the damn car! How can you not have heard of it!”

But it’s never been advertised, was really manufactured to appease a very small market and to be able to run it in NASCAR, so it’s just not out there like most cars.

I have really broad experience in IT compared to most IT folks, and wider knowledge than most because of that and due to the certs I’ve pursued over the years.

Sometimes funny things happen related to that.

The other day at work someone was explaining to me how to configure a virtual networking device that allows for client-access VPNs (if you don’t know what that is, don’t worry about it).

They assumed since I was not on the networking team and have never been associated with that team that I had no idea about any of this.

But here’s the funny part.

“Yeah, I know, I wrote the installation guide for this appliance,” I say.

Because I did write the installation guide. A couple of years ago no one else knew enough about the very disparate things that need to be done to make this appliance work, so it fell to me to put it all in one place.

The person speaking to me meant no harm and just wasn’t aware, but I do think it’s amusing when someone explains to you how to do something you literally wrote the company-wide guide on how to make it work.

If I were Bill Gates rich, I’d pay Danielle Haim to come to my house every day and play guitar.

Every day. Believe it.

if you ever code something that "feels like a hack but it works," just remember that a CPU is literally a rock that we tricked into thinking

— daisyowl (@daisyowl) March 15, 2017

And if I were that rock, I’d hate us for it.

As far as I can determine, pants are verboten in her world.

I’ve set a new record: the longest I’ve ever had a new car without someone intentionally damaging it or something — like a rock flung from the road — accidentally damaging it.

A new car alas is an envy magnet. People enjoy harming them.

This one though is very nondescript (at least until you rev the engine) so it doesn’t attract much attention. Almost certainly why someone hasn’t pulled up alongside in a parking lot and slammed their door into it repeatedly, etc.

Oh, it’ll get damaged eventually. It’s a machine in the world. But my previous record for a new-to-me car not being damaged is two days. Now I’ve gone 12.

Remember when Obama said he'd close Gitmo, got elected, & never did it? Dems cant even be bothered to just pretend they support single payer

— maple cocaine (@historyinflicks) July 22, 2017

Obama wasn’t the worst president ever (that dubious honor might yet go to Trump) but he wasn’t the walking-on-water savior that the left imagines him to be.

I know the pseudo-left will despise me for saying this, and I’ll be branded as racist and horrible, but if Obama hadn’t been black I suspect progressives would have been more able to clearly see how objectively harmful were his policies and his “negotiating” style of giving it all away in the beginning and hoping for crumbs tossed afterward.

I hate cities and I hate dogs.

I’ve linked to this article before, but it is very good so here it is again.

What many more quantitative-oriented people miss (sometimes in the most comical fashion) is that just because you’ve used calculus to solve some self-posed problem or tossed some statistics at something, if you have poor data, ridiculous assumptions, have misunderstood the problem or otherwise engaged in some other fundamental cock-up, you have learned less than nothing.

Because you have wasted time and increased the entropy of the universe, you are now actually behind where you were when you started.

In the case of economics, its history since the 1930s has been to focus on making the real world conform to increasingly-complex models rather than assaying that world as it is.

This happens in many fields, but by far eonomics has been the most detrimental to the world — more destructive than many wars.

The illusion of veracity can be achieved by mathing something up. Making a field opaque with unnecessary intellectual hurdles is a great way for practitioners to exclude others who might question their conclusions (“You can’t understand transfinite extension of the mu-calculus, therefore your opinion on why the rich shouldn’t be allowed to own you is invalid!”).

Stating an equation doesn’t magically transubstantiate questionable assumptions to verity; running regression analysis on a data corpus doesn’t reveal anything when your input is garbage.