Time

I've got to say that this year flew by for me. It makes me reflect on just how fast time in general goes anymore. When I was young, I thought first grade seemed like forever. Heck, just summer break felt like forever. Unfortunately, all of those times did pass.

Supposedly the reason for this perception is because the younger we are, less time means more to us. For example, if I am seven years old, one year will be a seventh of my life. If I am twenty-six, a year is a significantly smaller fraction.

Even on a smaller scale there is some truth to this. I remember my dad taking us to an antique store when we were younger, and it felt like we were in there forever. Now if my dad takes me to an antique store, it may take us half an hour, but it doesn't feel like I'm wasting my life in there. My disposition toward antiquing hasn't really changed, so there has to be some validity to this phenomenon. I don't think it can be proven scientifically, but I know I am not the only one who thinks this way.

Time has been scientifically proven to be relative however. Have a happy new year!

Lovecraft

Hard to describe what lovecraftian means, but here's an example.

I have never had the pleasure of reading any HP Lovecraft books, but his influence is referenced in countless instances of fiction. It's hard to say what's exactly Lovecraftian, but you know it when you see it. Some of the key elements are driving people insane, tentacles, ancient beings, and more tentacles. The prominence of these creatures in popular culture still shocks me when people still don't know what Lovecraft means. Hopefully, if you were unfamiliar with the term before reading this, then you'll now recognize this theme.

Even though I have never read a Lovecraft book, I get excited when a story introduces a Lovecraft element. World of Warcraft has been slowly introducing creatures called "the old gods" that are basically Cthulu and pals. Some of the names are similar too. In vanilla WoW, there is a boss called C'thun which is a clear reference to Cthulu. In the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the master was trying to resurrect the old ones. He even referenced that they are imprisoned under the earth. The flood parasites from Halo could arguably be considered Lovecraftian due to their design. I don't know what it is, but a story just gets cooler for me when they bring these guys up. I think it's because these creatures have the unique characteristic of being the ultimate evil (even more so than the devil in my opinion) and therefore the greatest challenge for a hero to overcome.

Anachronistic Artifacts

I've talked about Atlantis before being a huge subject of interest for me, but anachronistic artifacts probably intrigue me the most. Not only do anachronistic artifacts -at the very least- imply a lost civilization, but they force us to question our current understanding of our planet and human history. Plus unlike Atlantis, these artifacts are absolute facts.

Piri Reis Map
 
This map is actually a compilation of other maps by the Ottoman admiral Piri Reis in 1513. The source maps used were allegedly from the Library of Alexandria. The most amazing aspect of this map is that it depicts the coastline of Antarctica, and Antarctica wasn't discovered until 1820.


Most peculiar about the map is that the notes about Antarctica indicate that the area has a warm climate. These notes lead speculation that it may not really be Antarctica, or perhaps our understanding of climate is seriously flawed.

The Antikytheria Mechanism 

An ancient Greek analog computer found in 1901 off the coast of Antikytheria. Dated to 150-100 BC, this clockwork machine was used to track astronomical positions for calendrical purposes. The first astronomical clocks weren't made until the 14th century. This artifact predates that by over a millennium!

The picture may not look very impressive minus the fact that it's an ancient gear, but if you look up further scans of this artifact, you can see how remarkably complex it is.

Baghdad Battery

As depicted in the picture, this artifact consists of a ceramic pot with a tube of copper and an iron rod inside. The style of the pottery suggests that it is from 200-600 AD. It has been hypothesized that if someone were to put an acid such as lemon juice, vinegar, or even wine; an electrical current could be produced. The purpose of this battery has been speculated to be for electroplating gold onto silver trinkets found in Iraq.

Perhaps not as impressive as the others on this list, it is still fascinating that electricity may have been harnessed so early.

The London Hammer
I saved the best for last. This is a hammer found in London, TX in 1936. What's remarkable is that this hammer is encased in a 400 million year old rock! Now some have suggested that this may have been the result of a process called concretion. The problem with that theory is that the wooden handle has already begun the process of transforming into coal.

Obviously a discovery like this calls everything into question and makes researching anachronistic artifacts one of my favorite hobbies. 

Drugs

You can catch up on Netflix.

Arguably one of my favorite shows of all time, Breaking Bad has at long last come to an end. There won't be any spoilers in this blog post, but I thought I would take this opportunity to share my thoughts on the drug war.

To start things off, I am not an advocate of recreational drugs. With that said, I do believe that a lot of the problems with these drugs are overblown. I can't comment on all drugs (in fact I do think heroine and meth are very dangerous), but I cannot think of a single reason why marijuana should be illegal over alcohol. I personally don't smoke marijuana because my lungs are very sensitive (main reason I don't smoke tobacco either), but I do enjoy a good cocktail and am willing to enjoy them until I get a tad tipsy.

The plant that struck fear in a generation!

I think the only reason why it's still illegal is purely cultural. I would be surprised if it is still illegal in twenty years. There has been a lot of negative programming against marijuana, and the people subjected to it are still mostly in charge. I do sense that a changing tide is coming with more and more prominent people advocating for the legalization of marijuana.

Heck, California's medical marijuana laws are already kind of a joke. This is just another argument for state's rights. If marijuana was up to the states, I'd be willing to bet it would be legalized much faster and would be a huge tax boon. Prohibition of alcohol proved to be futile. The best way to discourage anything is by taxing it.

I also wonder if there is a false idea propagated by messages of legalizing marijuana using the language of "legalize drugs" as in all drugs. Philosophically, I am not entirely opposed to this notion, but politically, marijuana is a much easier sell than all of the ones that are particularly harmful. However, I think if drugs weren't illegal, then people addicted to them might be less afraid to seek out help. Legalizing drugs would also eliminate or drastically reduce the crime associated with drugs. Instead of resolving a business dispute in a gang fire fight, it could be resolved in court.

Creationism vs Evolution

Note: For the purposes of this post, when I say evolution, I am lumping it in with abiogenesis (life from non-life). Technically that's not true, but culturally, these terms are conflated constantly.
 
Creationism doesn't necessarily deny evolution, but it does have a different starting point than evolution. This is where the source of the debate starts and where the concepts of micro and macro evolution originate. Intelligent design on the other hand can agree with evolution except it will deny the abiogenesis claim and still believe that some sort of intelligence crafted the first cell.

A depiction of the antediluvian (pre-flood) world.

As opposed to intelligent design, creationism more points to the Bible as an explanation for the origins of the world and mankind. I have never personally verified the validity of the 6000 year claim, but if you do accept a Genesis account, it is really hard to believe that mankind evolved over millions of years from single celled organisms. Noah's flood is also used to help explain certain problems such as dinosaurs, geological features, and other matters that are hard to explain with such a small timetable. I don't want to get too in depth into this, but there are some fascinating theories. The problem with all of these theories is that it is virtually impossible to substantiate these theories (like the world having an ocean of water in the sky), and that all of their "evidence" is derived from the Bible. If you don't accept the Bible as an authority, there's no reason to take these theories seriously. Although the theories will compel you to take a closer look at Genesis. There are some details that were certainly skipped over in Sunday School.


To be totally blunt, the biggest issue with creationism is that it simply isn't scientific; however, this doesn't make their claims untrue - just nearly impossible to prove. In order to be scientific, there has to be a falsifiable claim. Interestingly, both intelligent design and abiogenesis are not scientific either for this same reason. Evolution does not have this problem and thus is a compelling argument, but I do have some issues that I have yet to receive a satisfying answer.

1. Dating. How does any dating work? I understand that it uses radioactive decay and the equation is as follows:

D = D₀ + N(t) (e^λt − 1)

where t is age of the sample, D is number of atoms of the daughter isotope in the sample, D₀ is number of atoms of the daughter isotope in the original composition, N is number of atoms of the parent isotope in the sample at time t (the present), given by N(t) = N_oe^-λt, and λ is the decay constant of the parent isotope. But how can you possibly know D₀? If t is what we are trying to solve, λ can be found experimentally (although that can be debated), and everything else is measured at the time; but none of that explains D₀. It seems like one equation with two unknowns. How do they know there weren't contaminants? And how do they know this technique works past a certain point? If the dating cannot be verified, then the fossil record cannot be verified which is arguably the biggest evidence for evolution (at least in the macro sense).

2. Abiogenesis. I already alluded to this before, but as of right now, there is no credible theory to support abiogenesis. We have only observed life from life. The shear complexity of life seems to lean more to the intelligent design hypothesis.

3. The Meaning of Life. This is more metaphysical than scientific, but it's just hard for me to accept a fully naturalist explanation when humans are just so different compared to other creatures. We have music, art, architecture, and the appreciation for aesthetic value which has absolutely zero survival benefit. Certain axioms of mine seem predicated on the necessity of a human soul too which obviously cannot have occurred naturally.

These reasons compel me toward a creationist viewpoint despite the serious problems that creationism obviously has. I think the hardest aspect of creationism is that the explanations to get around dinosaurs, age of the Earth, and the like are very imaginative but are entirely based on the Bible. If you don't believe in the Bible, then there is no way you would be convinced of it. Truthfully, if it weren't for my metaphysical reason, I would have a hard time believing it myself. In the end, I just accept it as a mystery. 

Revelations

In hindsight, I should've written about the various interpretations of the book of Revelations back in January, but I'm doing it now in contrast with my short discussion on Genesis. Like with Genesis, I'm only going to focus on the various interpretations instead of going way in depth. Smarter people than me have already done so, but an introduction into this may be useful or at least interesting to people.

There are various interpretations of the book of Revelations (also called the Apocalypse of St. John), but there are three main interpretations that I am going to introduce.

Amillennialism

I don't know if this is the official Lutheran position, but his was the position my pastor back home took when we were studying Revelations (Left Behind was really popular at the time). The basic gist of this interpretation is that Revelations is largely symbolic and that we are currently in the millennium. Not a literal millennium because the assertion is that it started from Christ's resurrection and will continue until His second coming. Instead they interpret 1000 years as meaning a long time. Revelations 20:3 states about Satan, "he might not deceive the nations any longer", and since Satan isn't really preventing the spread of the gospel, then he must be currently bound like he is in the book. The judgements and the more horrific stuff in the book generally seen as spiritual in nature.

Premillennialism

 When most people think of Revelations, this interpretation is what they are thinking of. This is the interpretation that the Left Behind books took. At some unknown point in the future, the rapture will come and trigger the 7 year tribulation which will be when all of the horrible events in Revelations will occur. Apparently there is an interpretation where there isn't a rapture. In fairness, the rapture isn't in Revelations. It's actually from 1 Thessalonians 4:17. Regardless, the millennium will occur after Jesus returns and ends the tribulation. The final judgement will take place after this 1000 year reign. 

Left Behind is without a doubt the main reason I got really interested in this topic. I should also mention that the duration of 7 years comes from Daniel 7. They do this because the parallels of Daniel's dreams and St. John are quite uncanny especially in regard to the Beast. Even though I read all of them, I can't really recommend the books especially if you aren't christian. My major criticism is the first books in the series did their best to realize what some of the symbolism in Revelation would actually mean, but then it gets really lazy in the latter half for instance the world is literally attacked by a demonic locust horde at one point.

Postmillennialism

This interpretation is very similar to amillennialism except this one is more optimistic in that the church will actually usher in the millennium by spreading the Gospel. This differs from amillennialism in that amillennialists are more pessimistic and that the end of the millennium will be triggered when the gospel can be no longer spread because Satan will no longer be bound. 

When I first was interested in this topic, I certainly was more convinced by the premillennialist, but over the years, I tend to agree with my pastor and believe in a more amillennial interpretation. I think the main reason for this is because so many of the events in Revelations clearly represent events that have already happened. Revelations 12 -to me- sounds like Joseph, Mary, and Jesus fleeing Herod.

I will admit that I was so inspired by the Left Behind series that I actually wrote my own Revelation story idea. I did write an outline, but college took up way too much of my time. In the few chapters I did write, I still love my joke that the apocalypse is heralded by the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series. My tendency against the premillennial interpretation is pretty much what has stopped my writing.

Pregenesis

Can't really talk about before this though.

My interest in the concept of pregenesis or more specifically pre-Adam arose to the obvious problem that creationists have with explaining dinosaurs. I thought it would be interesting to talk about what people speculate what might have come before the events of Genesis or more specifically Adam.

Now I don't believe I can get earlier than than the text in the image to the left, but this is an objection raised by atheists to the uncaused cause or namely the concept of an eternal God. I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that our brains just cannot truly comprehend infinity. Calculus is a special branch of mathematics just to handle the concept of infinity. Regardless, my pregenesis discussion will begin with the second verse since we are given a description of the physical universe.

Before God declares, "Let there be light", the Earth already exists and is described as formless, empty, and covered in deep waters. This implies that the Earth has been around for some indefinite amount of time since the Bible refers to the first day after God declares light. What I find interesting about this point is that creationists and evolutionists bicker over the age of the Earth. Evolutionists argue that it is about a billion years old where as creationists will claim that it is merely a couple thousand. However, when you read just the first five verses of Genesis closely, you can see how biblically (obviously, evolutionists don't use the Bible as an argument) both interpretations could be correct.

With regards to dinosaurs mentioned earlier, some will claim that the "days" in Genesis may not be literal days especially since according to Genesis the sun, moon, and stars were created on the fourth day. It's admittedly a stretch and there are other explanations for dinosaurs that creationists use, but I don't feel it's important to get into them. For me personally, I just accept it as a mystery. It's possible that the "days" could be referring to an indefinite amount of time, but we are honestly only considering it because of our current understanding of Earth. It is worth mentioning that in other places in the Bible (particularly Daniel) many biblical scholars interpret days as meaning years. A hard cry away from billions of years, but it's worth mentioning that a totally literal reading of the Bible is unwise. The book is filled with symbolism.

I couldn't really find biblical proof to substantiate some of these claims, but some "theologians" use the loose interpretations of days to explain things like dinosaur, but more importantly they allude to the idea that the earth was empty to argue that this could imply protocivilizations. This may say a lot about me, but naturally, Atlantis comes up in these threads. Again, there is really no substantiation to these interpretations. It's more or less fan fiction used by some to attempt to reconcile the obvious contradictions between the claims in the Bible with scientific theories. If you truly believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, you must accept that some of it is symbolism and some of it is just a mystery. It is intellectually dishonest to claim otherwise.

Dark Matter

Obviously, you can't see dark matter, so enjoy a space picture

One of the most frustrating aspects in physics is that scientists have yet to construct a Theory of Everything that can explain everything in the universe in one coherent theory. A lot of this has to do with the fundamental forces and reconciling general relativity with quantum field theory. General relativity mostly deals with gravity while the latter deals with the other three. Aside from this, astronomers will also encounter phenomena that doesn't fit their current models. To counter that, they use a concept which I consider to be extremely lazy and very unscientific.

Probably the simplest example is with the Big Bang Theory. For reasons that I won't get into, The Big Bang Theory is the widest accepted theory of our universe's origins. The problem with the theory is that scientists were surprised to learn that the universe's expansion is accelerating. To account for this discrepancy, they came up with the term Dark Energy to account for the missing energy in the universe that must be causing the acceleration.

I can't pinpoint a precise example, but whenever there are gravitational anomalies observed in space that cannot be explained, scientists will blame it on Dark Matter. Instead of considering that maybe their equations may be wrong, scientists come up with the terms Dark Matter and Dark Energy as a catch all to explain discrepancies. What's worse is that Dark Matter is described as matter that doesn't interact with the electromagnetic spectrum meaning that we can't verify its existence.

What I find so frustrating with Dark Energy and particularly Dark Matter is that these are so easily accepted as fact, yet God is unscientific. You can't detect God, but you can arguably see His affects on humanity. But for some reason, God is not scientific yet Dark Matter is. It is a similar complaint I have with String Theory which is not a theory by the scientific standard, yet people will proclaim its truth just because smart people think it is. I'm not going to try and prove God in this blog post, but my frustrating question is why are people so quick to dismiss God when something unexplained happens, yet Dark Matter and Dark Energy are accepted as scientific fact when they actually aren't? I feel that this lazy dark crutch is what's currently holding us back from finding the elusive Theory of Everything.

Moore's Law & Parallelization

Moore's Law is the observation that the number of transistors doubles every two years. Unfortunately, Moore's Law is getting closer and closer to a physical limit as the size of transistors are becoming the size of molecules. My education in computer engineering has made a lot about computers less mysterious, but building transistors the size of molecules let alone fitting billions of them on the size of quarter still blows my mind.

To combat this inevitability, you may have noticed processors consisting of multiple cores. This is the heart of parallelization. The problem with parallelization is transforming software to best optimize this new hardware. It seems simple enough to figure out what processes can run simultaneously, but the issue arises when these processes need to access the same resources. There are different design possibilities, but I'll just give a simple example.

Imagine a bank account that you share with someone you trust. You both are trying to withdraw some money for some purpose. There is currently $100 in the account. You need $50, and your friend needs $60. Suppose you access the ATM at roughly the same time. You and your friend see the account balance at $100, so you decide to withdraw the amounts you need. Unfortunately, your friend is just a bit faster and now you've overdrawn the account and are charged a fee as a result. If you had known that your friend was planning to withdraw $60, you wouldn't have tried to withdraw $50, so you wouldn't have had an overdraw fee. Now this example is not trivial. It at least was prevalent when self service banking became more of a thing. With the advent of parallel processors change bank to memory and imagine one process with millions like it, and you quickly see why this is a problem.

There are a variety of design choices to consider in solving this problem of parallelization, but the one most common that I've seen in addressing this issue is the concept of a lock and key. I have actually seen this terminology with share drives on Microsoft systems. A shared file will actually be considered locked, and changes can only be made by the user who opened it first.

In code, the terms 'lock' and 'key' can be used as syntax to reserve a block of memory for a parallel process to use. Now this solves the problem of sharing, but the challenge to programmers is optimizing the lock and key method while also making their programs be able to work in parallel as much as possible. Typically, you want to keep a block of memory open as much as possible and only lock it when it is being written to. Thus, if you are only reading memory, then everyone can read the memory.

Parallelization may not help a computer execute a line of code faster, but if that line of code can be split up into multiple lines of code, then Moore's Law in terms of raw processing power can be maintained for the foreseeable future even when transistors reach the size of atoms. If anyone is serious about programming, this will be a skill that you will have to learn.

Social Media

I recently got into an argument with an older coworker of mine. He was lambasting social media and how it was ruining society especially the younger generation. While he had some good points which I fully agreed with, I feel that social media has some merits too that are often overlooked or not appreciated.

Without debate, Facebook is the biggest social media platform on Earth. Completely eclipsing MySpace back in the mid 2000's, Facebook is now used around the entire Earth. I was not one of the first users, but I joined back in 2005 when it was exclusive for college students which allowed me to see the evolution of the platform. It's funny looking back now at what Facebook has become. Facebook started as simply a collection of profile pages with a very simple design (ultimately made it better than MySpace which ended up being a vomit of HTML). When Facebook implemented the news feed feature, my friends were quick to denounce it as a violation of privacy. When Facebook expanded to everyone with an email address, my friends thought that Facebook was over. Ironically, these features ultimately made Facebook what it is today. Only a handful of my friends actually left Facebook due to these changes, and only one of those friends do I actually stay in touch with today.

Is Facebook a violation of our privacy? Only if you allow it to. Facebook has ruined people's lives and privacy is a thing of the past, but maybe this loss of privacy is only making people be a little more responsible online. The reality is that while people now have to be more careful what they post on Facebook, it's still the best way to share photos and ideas with friends when they are far away. Being in the Army, Facebook is by far the best way for me to stay in touch with friends and family back home. When Facebook becomes a replacement for actual social contact instead of enhancing long distance contact, then I can see it being a problem.

Admittedly, I only got into Twitter because of a college programming project. I wrote my own Twitter application in Python. In order to test it, I had to create my own twitter profile. This is why my handle is @purduewilly. Definitely not my first choice, but I didn't really care at the time. Regardless, my Twitter application doesn't work anymore. I probably just need to update the code with the new API, but there's no point since I am a huge fan of the Twitter iPhone app. Once I got the iPhone app and tinkered around with who I followed, Twitter became my primary source of news.

If you use Twitter correctly and not follow a bunch of celebrities and other non-interesting people, Twitter can be very useful. You can use hashtags (#) to follow a trending conversation. You can follow news outlets and get breaking stories typically much faster than when they post it on their respective sites. I only follow one news commentator at the time, Joe Scarborough of Morning Joe, and since he's limited to 140 characters, he is forced to by pithy which I think forces people to cut BS. Like with Facebook, I don't see any merit to tweet your friends, but using it to keep in touch with the larger world is great. I typically only tweet movie reviews or whenever I'm engaging in a trending topic. Occasionally I'll share news articles through Twitter because I've been able to link my Twitter with my Facebook which only enhances the platform in my opinion.

The last social media platform I'll discuss is Reddit. Unlike the latter two, I feel Reddit is still mostly anonymous. I joined the site after Digg.com changed its interface and became very unusable for me. Like Facebook, Reddit had a very slim and simple interface which made the switch very easy. Reddit and Digg are basically a collection of popular links. Their popularity is dependent upon users upvoting and downvoting. What really made them social media platforms were the forums. You can click on a link and then make a comment about the link. Unfortunately, a lot of people will comment on a link based solely on the headline without reading the contents, but it still provides a valuable function sometimes even providing more information than the link itself.

One key aspect to Reddit that Digg never had are the subreddits. Digg did divide links based on category, but the subreddits take that concept to a greater extreme. Links are not just separated by broad categories but are separated by very specific categories. If I want to look for Breaking Bad links, instead of going to an entertainment section, I can go to the Breaking Bad subreddit. There are subreddits for even the most obscure of topics. If by some small chance it doesn't exist, then you can make one. This feature actually creates a community of sorts and makes this platform just as enjoyable as the other two. 

Vision

I recently got laser eye surgery which put me out for pretty much the entire month of January. I had zero interest in looking at any kind of screen let alone blog. I thought I'd share my experience and be sure to pass along some helpful advice.

Let me just say that this surgery has changed my life. I have been wearing glasses since 3rd grade. I've been wearing contacts since high school. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, but bottom line is that they are ultimately annoying. In the Army, I have to qualify with my weapon every year. Every year I have to deal with my glasses fogging up when I try and shoot. Because I need glasses I have to wear inserts, and cleaning the ballistic eye wear with inserts is truly maddening. Hopefully this surgery will make me a more lethal soldier. Aside from the Army aspect, just being able to lay my head down on my pillow and watch television is practically a euphoric experience. It was impossible to lay my head down on my pillow with glasses, and with contacts I would get dry eye after a while.

PRK

The laser eye surgery that I got was known as PRK. This is superior to LASIK in that I don't have any of the negative long term side effects that LASIK provides. People with LASIK may have trouble getting jobs as pilots and divers due to the effect the change in pressure may have on their eyes.

The other great thing about PRK is that more people can qualify for it. I was very lucky because my left eye barely qualified for PRK due to my astigmatism. I wouldn't have been able to get LASIK even if I wanted to. Basically in order to qualify for any of these surgeries, you need to have a thick enough cornea in order for them to sculpt it using a laser.

The best advice I can give is to -of course- follow the doctor's instructions. Right after the surgery the eye doctor poured cold water on my eyes. Then he put "band-aid" contacts in my eyes. I was able to see perfectly for about an hour, and then the burning kicks in. Needless to say, I popped the pain pills and was virtually knocked out for about a week. In hindsight, I would've gone straight home and avoid the burning. The eye doctor also gave my vitamin C pills and eye drops. As of writing this, I still need eye drops due to persistent dry eye, but it's not so bad. I can't comment on the vitamin C, but the doctor claims it'll help me heal.

LASIK

 Now I didn't have LASIK personally, but someone I know did at around the same time I did. He had a remarkably faster recovery time. Aside from the long term side effects mentioned earlier, LASIK is actually pretty harmless. You heal faster, and he was able to go back to work after three days.

I can't comment on any other short term effects, but he can see 20/20 and is very happy with it. Ultimately, I think you just have to decide if you want to suck up the short term side effects and avoid extreme changes in elevation or endure the negative short term side effects and not have to worry about your vision ever again. Chances are you may not have much of a choice, but those are the main differences are far as I see.