Purpose of an Acorn

The following is the transcript of a brief random conversation that took place late at night in our kitchen on 2013 April 13th Saturday:

• Father is at the kitchen sink cleaning the coffee pot.
• Son enters kitchen.
• Son:  I don't get it.
• Father (without turning around):  What is the purpose of an acorn?
• Son:  To become a tree.
• Father:  And what is the purpose of a tree?
• Son:  To make more acorns.
• Father:  Now you got it.
• Silent pause; Father continues cleaning coffee pot.
• Son:  Cool, ... I guess.
• Son leaves kitchen.

Our Father Sun

Our Father Sun
And Mother Earth
We thank you for
Giving Us birth

From simple things
We used to be
We rise up in
Complexity

The stars are Ours
The first Our Sun
We've come so far
Yet just begun

We know Our names
And We can see
Where We will go
Our destiny

We leave Our home
New worlds to find
To plant Our seeds
New life new mind

The stars are Ours
The first Our Sun
We've come so far
Yet just begun

Our Children go
Before Us now
Our lessons learned
We do endow

We say goodbye
We stay behind
We hope to meet
Again some time

The stars are Ours
The first Our Sun
We've come so far
Yet just begun

Our Father Sun © 2013 David Wallace Croft.
This song is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Godless Documentary

A few years back, I was interviewed for a Canadian documentary on atheist communities in the United States. In the interview, I talked about our church-state separation activism with regard to the lawsuits we filed asking Federal courts to rule as unconstitutional the Texas laws mandating a state "under God" pledge and daily silent prayer in public schools.

The documentary aired in Canada but was not accessible in the United States so I had no chance to see what became of it until just recently. Thanks to a blog posting by Aron Ra, I became aware just this month that the 2011 documentary "Godless" by Craig Goodwill and Patricia Bush is now available on YouTube. My interview can be found at 34 minutes and 50 seconds into Part 2.

"Godless" does a great job of covering the Dallas area atheist community. When I was interviewed, I had mentioned our earlier efforts with the Humanist Fellowship of North Texas and our current progress with the Dallas Brights Family Meetup but that footage was not used in the documentary. I was pleased to see included video of my children participating in Fellowship of Freethought and Camp Quest educational and recreational activities.

Resolution Day

For my New Year's Resolution last year, I resolved to stop watching television at night so I could dedicate that time toward achieving my ambition of reading the many books that I collect. This was fairly effective, especially at first.

For my New Year's Resolution this year, I resolved to stop watching television at night by removing the television from my bedroom. This has been much more effective. I think there is a lesson there about achieving your goals by making compliance a path of least resistance rather than a test of willpower.

Our family celebrates New Year's Eve by writing our Resolutions on flying wish paper. In turn, each of us sets alight the paper bearing our personal aspirations for the future. With the lights dimmed, our family watches together as the glowing paper rises toward the ceiling and then falls again as ash. As our tradition holds, if the flying wish paper does not rise, an entirely new Resolution is required.

There is always something sacred about a flame in the dark. The ritual of the New Year's Resolution has religious origins that date back to ancient times. In addition to self improvement, it incorporates concepts of repentance, forgiveness, and renewal. In that spirit, I am adopting Resolution Day, to be celebrated on the eve before the month of Janus, as a new Optihumanist Holiday.

Optihumanist Principles 2012

My addition to the Optihumanist Principles for 2012 is as follows:

The skeptics inspect and inquire;
the gullible accept and expire.

Magnet Checklist Revised

In a previous blog entry, I documented using a Magnet Checklist for my daily maintenance tasks. Previously, I had mounted my magnet checklist to the side of a steel bookcase because that was the only ferromagnetic vertical surface in my bedroom. Unfortunately, I was not using the checklist on a daily basis as intended. I suspect this was partly because I had positioned it around a corner out of sight of the bedroom entrance and partly because I had to lean over the corner of a desk to reach the magnets.

A few months ago I moved my daily maintenance checklist to the inside of my bedroom closet door. Now I can display the checklist or put it away just by opening or closing the door. It is also much more accessible.

The catch was that I had to mount a magnetic surface to the wooden door. To prevent the surface of the door from being marred when I remove the checklist in the future, I used 3M Command strips instead of the adhesive backing that came with the magnetic whiteboard. Command strips are adhesives which separate from the surface cleanly when you stretch them by pulling on a tab.

I could have just marked the lines for the rows on the whiteboard using a dry erase marker but instead I stuck to using painters tape. Previously I have had problems with marker lines smearing when I slid the magnets back and forth between the "To-Do" and the "Done" columns. The tape also makes it easier to reorder the rows.

However, it did take excessively long to position and evenly space out the paint strips. For my new daily diet checklist on the side of my fridge, I just printed out the rows on a piece of paper. This made everything very easy, especially with regard to changing or reordering the rows in that all I have to do now is to edit the document and print another copy.

The other improvement was that I switched from using round disc magnets to push pin magnets are they are easier to manipulate. With push pin magnets, I now lift instead of slide. It is a wee bit quicker and probably reduces wear on the checklist surface.

This is my revised recommendation for building magnet checklists. It seems a bit funny that you might buy a magnetic dry erase whiteboard with no intent to actually write on its surface with a dry erase marker. I am not currently aware of a better magnetic surface to use for this purpose, however.

On a related note, I also have some travel preparation checklists which I maintain in Google Drive as electronic documents. I have discovered that if I just read the checklists online, I will sometimes gloss over an item and only notice that I skipped it later when I open my suitcase in my hotel room and find that I forgot to pack my shaving kit. I think this emphasizes the point the checklists should be checked. Now I print out the document each time I travel and check off, circle, or cross out items with a pen to make sure that nothing is overlooked.

The Stars Are Ours

The stars are ours,
The first our Sun,
We've come so far,
Yet just begun.

The Stars Are Ours © 2012 David Wallace Croft.
This poem is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Deducing Reality

I just finished reading the graphic novel Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth. It is based on the biography of Bertrand Russell and his quest to derive all of mathematics using logic, e.g., to prove that one plus one equals two.

A recurrent theme in the book is that there is a tendency in logicians towards madness. A friend once told me the same about philosophers. Certainly logic and philosophy are related fields.

The book leaves it open as to the direction of the cause-effect relationship of this madness-logician correlation. Does delving into logic drive you mad or does being a bit mad drive you to logic? I suspect it is more of the latter.

Schizophrenia was cited as one of the main causes of madness that plagued the logicians and their family members. Schizophrenia is characterized by auditory hallucinations, i.e., hearing voices in your head. Rather than being able to determine the true nature of reality based on their own objective observations, schizophrenics have to deal with the possibility that their internal demons, of the sort proposed by Decartes, might be fooling their senses. In this situation, what can you truly know, other than that I am?

A respite from this uncertainty might be the alluring potential of deduction. Certainly much knowledge of the unseen can be deduced from the induced as is common in the sciences. And perhaps even the non-existence of the seen, or heard, can be deduced if the facts and logic merit.

Autothysis

A new form of altruism in the insect world has been discovered. Older individuals of a species of termite have the ability to create a toxic goo via a chemical reaction which kills both themselves and their attackers. This is another variant of autothysis (Greek: auto-, self; -thysis, sacrifice) in which an insect ruptures an organ to release a defensive substance when attacked.

Of course, we all know that a bee that stings in defense of its hive dies soon after. Likewise, human soldiers sacrifice themselves in defense of their families. A question to ask is how is insect altruism different from human altruism.

As far as I know, insects never need to be conscripted. Humans, however, are frequently less inclined to lay down their lives on behalf of others without some external persuasion.

A key difference might be that humans engage in within-species competition. Ants are designated as either workers, soldiers, or royalty at an early age. Humans, due to their increased intelligence, have the potential to be be any or all of these things, depending on their competitive interactions with their fellow humans.

As part of this within-species competition, humans are also intelligent enough to be able to exploit the altruism of others. Rather than merely acting instinctively to preserve the species, individual humans can imagine and implement a chain of causes and effects which lead to reaping benefits for themselves at the expense of their more generous and gullible brethren.

This might explain why humans have evolved to be so much smarter than other species. By evolving past a certain critical threshold of intelligence, humans not only have to contend with the tooth and claw of lions, tigers, and bears, but also the force and fraud of their siblings. Those individuals that are able to deceive while not being deceived produce more offspring. Instead of males evolving bigger antlers to fight off other males for mates, humans are in a runaway arms race for bigger brains.

Predatory Exchange

Ideally, in a voluntary exchange, each party is better off as a result.  Since neither party is forced into the trade, neither has any motivation to proceed with the transaction unless it is to their individual benefit.  I trade you my excess apples in exchange for your excess oranges.  Now we both share the fruits of our labor.

There is a subset of voluntary exchange, however, in which one party is consistently worse off.  That is to say, they would have been better off not engaging in the trade at all.  Why do they do it?  Because they expect to be better off even though they will not.

When the other party knows it, the relationship is predatory.  I would call it cannibalistic except that the predatory party never considers the exploited class to be of their own kind.  Since there is no coercion involved and the victims are outside of their group, the predators do not view their behavior as unethical.

While no force is involved, there is often fraud.  The snake oil salesman is a classic example.  The priest is another.  I trade you my excess snake oil in exchange for your excess apples and oranges.  I trade you supernatural life after death in exchange for your tithe.  Now we both share the fruits of your labor.

Another form of predatory exchange involves neither force nor fraud.  Instead the predator relies upon the ignorance of the prey.  "Caveat emptor", they rationalize.  Some victims eventually wise up but there is always another generation:  "There's a sucker born every minute".

If you are engaging in a transaction with another member of the human race and you know that the other fellow would be better off not doing the deal, stop.  If you are committing fraud, you are clearly in the wrong.

If you are merely exploiting the ignorance of others, you are still in the wrong.  You might be able to still do the deal with a clear conscience if you can explain to the other party what they need to know to make an informed decision.  If they still want to proceed, at that point you have to wonder what they know that you do not.