This post is set up to float to the top. I'm getting a bunch of new readers lately, so I figured a welcome/orientation post is appropriate.

Welcome to my journal! (Yeah, yeah, I know, the cool kids call it a blog these days.)

I post intermittently, sometimes at length, usually about personal topics, sometimes about controversial ones. I love thoughtful comments, even (sometimes especially) when they disagree with me. Anonymous comments or private messages are OK, too.

I expect politeness, though -- especially to my other commenters. If you can't be civil, be silent. If I start getting a wave of hostile anonymous commenters, I will likely change my policy.

I occasionally (though rarely) write friends-locked or filtered posts. I have two opt-in filters: fiction (for fragments of stories) and rants (for topics I'm prepared to be offensive about). If you're interested in joining my "friends" list or filters, comment here or email me.

Some links I keep here for convenience:

• my writeup of my stroke and recovery.
  
• my poetry list
  

I have been listening to this song for thirty years without actually knowing what the hell the opening words were. I parsed it as roughly "Brother budda coconuty budda forra daymis sister hadda nudderun sh'paydit for a lime." Yes, I could have looked it up, but never did.

The other day I was listening to this song and the opening words were clearly:
"Brother bought a coconut,
He bought it for a dime.
His sister had another one,
She paid it for a lime."

No ambiguity at all. I can no longer understand why they were ever unclear.

The relationship between what I perceive and what I perceive is a great mystery to me sometimes.

...but that I woke up with stuck in my head and figured I would write down so it would leave me alone.

"Ground Zero"
A quirky magical-realist ensemble-cast drama, somewhat in the spirit of Northen Exposure, that follows a group of characters connected to a Muslim community center built at the site of the 9/11 attacks (cf Park 51). Characters include:

• Two community spiritual leaders, YoungPriest and OldPriest. YoungPriest is a young modern liberal inclusivist type, the Islamic equivalent of a Unitarian Universalist, eager to promote a different, more modern vision of Islam better suited to the twenty-first century and life in America, but haunted by the fear of losing touch with their heritage altogether in the process, much as they have lost touch with their estranged and more traditional parents.
  OldPriest is a more old-guard traditionalist type, who is privately worried that his more hard-line religious stance will be seen as a threat in this post-9/11 world (as indeed it often is) despite his own peaceful nature, but nevertheless feels obliged to stand up for his traditions.
  In some ways they form the core of the show; most plots involve them in one way or another and they have close ties to everyone else.
  They both started having obscure but compelling visions shortly after the bombings, which led them (independently) to be strongly involved in the formation of the Center. They continue to have visions, the content of which is typically obscure but typically turns out to relate to various issues being faced by other members of the community.
  They start out largely at odds in terms of personality and the nature of their faith, though respecting each other's role in bringing the Center about; they work together but keep their distance. When they discover they have been receiving identical visions, they start to bond over this shared experience.
  
  
• Cop, a middle-aged Catholic police officer who was significantly injured and lost their partner during the WTC bombings, who strongly opposed the building of the Center and becomes actively involved with it as they look for a reason to shut it down. Initially an enemy who gradually becomes a reluctant ally, mediated in part by a growing attraction to Boss.
  
  
• Boss, a retired attorney and former member of the N.Y.State Assembly, once an active member of the New York Islamic community but estranged from it after 9/11, who agrees to function as the Center's administrative head. Actively hostile to OldPriest, reluctantly tolerates YoungPriest, and frequently at odds with Cop despite a growing romantic interest.
  
  
• Kid, a local kid whose parents died during the bombings when they were six years old. Grandparent is currently Kid's only caretaker. Kid is now in their early teens, frequently in trouble with the law. Initially Cop catches Kid vandalizing the Center and lets Kid go with a wink and a nod. Later Kid escalates, resulting in someone getting hurt; Kid is then arrested, but YoungPriest intervenes in sentencing and manages to get Kid assigned to community service at the Center under their supervision. Kid plays Cop and YoungPriest against each other a lot until they finally catch on.
  
  
• Grandparent, seventy years old, recently lost their spouse, lost their only child during the 9/11 bombings, grandparent and primary caretaker of Kid, whom they are increasingly unable to control or provide for and extremely worried about. Extremely hostile to the Center, and shows up there attempting to get Kid's community service venue changed. In response, OldPriest starts assigning Kid to perform chores around Grandparent's house as part of the community service; when Kid treats that as an excuse to slack off, Grandparent and OldPriest become reluctant allies in Kid's care. Grandparent has an existing inimical relationship with Boss that pre-dates the Center.
  

Mostly, it isn't different at all. My husband and I had been living together in a mutually committed, mutually supportive, monogamous relationship for nearly twenty years before we got married; we continue to live together in a mutually committed, mutually supportive, monogamous relationship. Emotionally, not much of anything has changed. And there are more practical aspects, like my husband being covered by my employee-sponsored health insurance now, so we don't have to pay for separate insurance.

But I basically expected all of that.

It irritates me when people talk about "family" in a way that excludes mine... either because we don't have children, or because we don't have wives, or for other reasons.

But I expected all of that, too.

Really, marriage has been pretty much what I expected.

The biggest surprise thus far has been how much it bugged me when I had to fill out my federal taxes as single. That still surprises me every year.

(Topic prompt.)

Oh jeez... where do I start?

So, the thing is, this whole idea of dividing up the world into "real things" and "mystical experiences" just fails to carve reality at its joints. People really do have the experiences that they have, mystical or otherwise. Of course, I understand perfectly well what people mean when they say that a particular experience is "real" or "not real," and for ordinary conversation that way of talking is good enough. But if I try to think in any kind of serious way about related issues of the relationship between proximal and distal stimuli, it stops being good enough very quickly.

But, OK, fine. If I embrace for now that simple-minded notion of "real", then the real colors are ~430nm wavelengths, ~540nm, and ~572nm. At least, those are the centerpoints of the response curves of the primary receptor cells in the human eye involved in color vision. All of our other experiences of color are constructed from different levels of relative stimulation of those three receptors, plus some other stuff... for example, if there's roughly equal strong stimulation of the ~540nm and ~572nm receptors and weak stimulation of the ~430nm receptors, we see yellowish-green, for example, but that's not "real", it's just something our brain makes up to represent the experience of having our color-receptors stimulated in that particular way. It's a hallucinatory experience shared by everyone.

Of course, there's nothing "mystical" about that hallucination; it's perfectly reliable and well understood. Let's label ~430nm "S", ~540nm "M" and ~572nm "L", because it's conventional. Our brains compute two results for each point we see, based on the intensity of the readings the S, M, and L receptors are getting at that point: (L-M) and (L+M-S) A 600 nm light stimulates L almost the same as M and stimulates S not at all, so (L-M) ~=0 and (L+M-S) >> 0. Our brains interpret that combination in a particular way which we've all agreed to call "yellow". ~450nm light has a high S and low M and L, leading to (L-M) ~=0 and (L+M-S) << 0, and our brains interpret that as what we label "blue." And so forth.

So, I can go back and ask "what are the color experiences evoked by 430nm, 540nm, and 572nm light?" and the answer turns out to be that we don't exactly have conventional names for those colors, but if we fudge a little we can agree to call them "blue", "green," and "red" respectively.
So if I really really approximate I can say that blue light stimulates a blue color receptor (aka "S", aka ~430nm) which inhibits the (L+M-S) aggregator, giving rise to an experience we call "blue", but yellow light doesn't stimulate a yellow color receptor -- there's no such thing. Rather, yellow light stimulates the red (L) and green (M) receptors roughly equally, which excites the (L+M-S) aggregator, giving rise to an experience we call "yellow." Another way of putting it is that when we perceive blue, we're perceiving the presence of ~430nm light, and when we perceive yellow, we're perceiving the absence of ~430nm light.

(I'm cringing as I write this because none of this is quite true, but it's close enough for my purposes here.)

So yes, there's a difference between the way we perceive blue and the way we perceive yellow... and yes, the way we perceive red and green are more like the way we perceive blue than they are like the way we perceive yellow. And yes, we do have this intuitive predisposition to treat the inference of the existence of X based on perceiving X as more "real" than the inference of the existence of Y based on failing to perceive X.

So, OK, yes, if I accept all of those approximations, then the colors Red, Blue, and Green are real in a way that the color Yellow is not.

But "a mystical experience"?

Well, why not? I mean, what do we mean by a mystical experience, anyway, if not a compelling experience available to healthy brains that doesn't correspond in any straightforward way to a corresponding physical presence?

But the thing is, this whole idea of dividing up the world into "real things" and "mystical experiences" just fails to carve reality at its joints. People really do have the experiences that they have, mystical or otherwise. Of course, I understand perfectly well what people mean when they say that a particular experience is "real" or "not real," and for ordinary conversation that way of talking is good enough. But if I try to think in any kind of serious way about related issues of the relationship between proximal and distal stimuli, it stops being good enough very quickly.

In principle, I'm all for respecting cultural heritage.

We all come from somewhere, our families come from somewhere, and knowing ourselves in the context of those lineages and histories gives our lives an additional source of symbolic richness that can be extremely valuable, not to mention making it easier to understand the symbolic narratives that we're already working within, whether we acknowledge it or not.

I endorse all of that.

But it's not that simple. Cultural heritage also creates cultural conflict.

I think about the flying of Confederate flags, for example, and the people who defend that practice on the grounds of respecting their cultural heritage, and the people who oppose that practice on the grounds of condemning the slaveowning behaviors that are a part of that heritage.

Or, closer to home, I think about my own Jewish heritage, which informs my life in a wide variety of ways, and how it occasionally comes into complicated conflict with modern political situations in the Middle East.

In principle, I think the right way to address that sort of tension is to sit with the contradictions of it, allow the tension between conflicting forces to drive a new synthesis. My identification with a cultural heritage informs the way I experience my cultural environment; my identification with modern culture informs the way I experience my cultural heritage. In principle, the result is something different from, and stronger and richer than, either one in isolation.

In practice, though... well, in practice I'm not always able to do that.

And all of that aside, it's not just about personal resolution, it's also about what we choose to endorse and reject collectively. I may endorse synthesis as the proper response to my own internal tension, but that's a far cry from insisting that anyone else do it, let alone that everyone else do it.

Whether I like it or not (and I don't), the real world is full of people who believe that the right way to approach the tension between conflicting forces, cultural or otherwise, is for the one force to win and the other to lose. So, sometimes I have to accept that the response to cultural conflict is that one cultural lineage, and its heritage, and its adherents, wins, and the other loses, and all that's left for me to do is pick a side.

A while back lillibet asked me how my colony planet would be governed.

This is not my answer to that question; my answer is here. But as I mention there, this question turned out to be more difficult to answer than I'd thought; the more I thought about it the more confused I became about what a government was.

I'm used to thinking of governments as groups of people who manage collective activity, at least nominally on behalf of the governed.

But it's clear to me that the "groups of people" part is optional; governments are more properly systems for managing collective activity. And having that system be a group of people is problematic in a number of ways, because, well, people are a problem.

But to simply say that governments are systems for managing collective activity is to say too little... by that definition, traffic lights are a government. Which isn't unreasonable, in a very limited sense, but seems an unhelpful place to start.

After a lot of false starts I tentatively concluded that approaching "government" as a noun was already starting off on the wrong foot.

Approaching it as a verb seemed more promising. If I ask whether a group is well governed, that at least suggests some related questions. Does it refrain from doing things that act against its long-term interests? Does it do things that act in its short-term and long-term interests? Etc. Certainly I'm comfortable saying that an individual is competently self-governing to the extent that they demonstrate those attributes, and I'm comfortable saying the same about a group, and I'm comfortable saying that a group that demonstrates those attributes shows no need for additional government beyond what it already has.

As for what kind of system best encourages its constituents to act in their own best interests, both individually and collectively... geez. Beats me. I have yet to see an answer I like.

Long-term, I think the answer I endorse is designing systems that are better at this stuff than existing human physiology, and turning over the heavy lifting to those systems. It's worked pretty well in other areas.

(Topic suggested by lillibet. See here for a list of topics; comment there if you want some of your own.)

So, my first answer was "Anarchy." Of course, the first step is to replace humans with a species capable of sustainable anarchy. Which I endorse for some but not all such species, but really just changes the question to what species my colony planet would be populated with, which seemed to do violence to the question. So scratch that.

My second answer was "By automated agents designed to, first, figure out what the hell people actually want (Lord knows we don't seem to have a clue most of the time), and second, optimize the environment for that." Which I also endorse, but also seemed to do violence to the spirit of the question, turning it into a question about automated systems engineering and requirements analysis rather than a question about government (1). So scratch that, too.

At that point I took a step back and started thinking more broadly about government. After several days of thinking about this, I more or less convinced myself that I don't actually know what a government is. (2)

So, OK, to hell with trying to derive this from first principles. I will instead talk about my own unjustified whims:

• Government leaders are Representatives. Each person can choose no more than one representative, and the threshold number of people a person must represent to count as a Representative varies as a function of the number of people.
  Other government employees are appointed by Representatives, and lose their position when their appointing Representative does.
  
  
• People can choose different representatives at any time.
  
  
• No Representative can serve more than a single term. How long a term is may vary, but in no event can a term exceed 20% of a typical working lifetime. In other words, being a Representative isn't a lifetime career.
  
  
• Not all people count equally towards the representation threshold. Individuals can earn greater weight by passing tests of historical knowledge, and potentially by other mechanisms.
  
  
• It is possible for everyone to choose the same Representative, in which case the state is totalitarian. It is possible for there to be no Representatives (that is, nobody is chosen by enough people to clear the threshold); in this case the government has collapsed altogether.
  
  
• It is expected, though not required, that Representatives will form various formal and informal groups, factions, etc. with their own internal power structures. To the extent that nations with distinct governments exist, they comprise such factions of Representatives and the people who chose them.
  
  
• There is no expectation that a given Representative's, or faction's, constituency will have anything else in common, although of course they often will. This includes geographic proximity.
  
  
• There is no expectation that a given Representative, or faction, will act in the perceived interests of other Representatives' constituents, though in practice Representatives belonging to a single faction typically will.
  
  
• Representatives can pass laws, which are binding on that Representative's constituents and nobody else. (3)Representative A can enter into a legal inheritance relationship with Representative B, such that B's laws are by default binding on A's constituents. (4)
  

---

(1) Though, really, governments are all about systems engineering and requirements analysis. All large organizations are.

(2) Semi-coherent thoughts about that here.

(3) There exists some sort of "grace period" mechanism to avoid suddenly discovering that what I'm doing is against the law. Switching Representatives does not eliminate liability for earlier violations of law.

(4) Courts and law enforcement are not part of the government at all, and not further discussed here, but they exist. There is also some mechanism whereby courts can reject laws on the grounds of being unenforceable.

I keep wondering what the implications are of declaring my husband my dependent on my federal tax return. The law is clear that I can't declare my spouse a dependent, but the law is also clear that for federal purposes my husband isn't treated as my spouse, so it seems to me to clearly follow that he isn't treated as my spouse for purposes of determining his eligibility as a dependent.

I'd be amused by that if I didn't continue to find unutterably INFURIATING the fact that, in order to fill out my taxes, I need to lie to my federal government and pretend to be single when I'm not.

As it is, I'm simply seething. As I've been doing every year, around this time, since I got married.

(Topic prompted by desireearmfeldt)

Well, I am a brain in a jar, of course. At least, that's what I infer from available evidence. I've never seen it directly, admittedly, but I imagine my brain floating in its container, kept alive by a nutrient solution pumped in and an extraction system that pumps waste out. Data is also pumped in, through various inbound channels, and when I form intentions to do something those intentions are intercepted and translated into signals on various outbound channels.

What happens after that, well, I don't really know how the implementation works, but I do observe that my subsequent inputs coordinate pretty well with my outputs. That is, if I form the intention to pick up a coffee cup, I subsequently get input consistent with that coffee cup being picked up. The thing is, that's true only to a limited extent. Severely limited, really. There's all sorts of intentions I form where that coordination just fails. If I form the intention to materialize a coffee cup out of thin air, for example, the inputs I subsequently get fail to synchronize with that intention at all.

So, anyway, I hope that information helps you people reproduce the bug.

I don't hold out much hope that you'll actually fix it, though. You don't even bother to acknowledge receipt of my bug reports and letters of complaint, which frankly is just a bad business practice. I don't like to make threats, but surely you must understand that sooner or later you're simply going to lose all your loyal customers if you continue such shoddy practices.

I look forward to hearing from you about this issue.