We finally got a snowfall here in Victoria. It wasn’t in time for Christmas but since Christmas is 6 days before New Year’s Day, and since we got this snow 6 days before LUNAR New Year’s Day, and since I’ve spent so much time in Asia that I have become a bit of a lunatic, I’m counting this as a white Christmas.
It’s funny how a blanketing of snow can get a person into the Christmas spirit even weeks after Christmas when everybody is figuring out how much overtime and exercise they’ll have to do to pay for it. I watched one of two movies that have become my personal Christmas traditions: “Christmas Vacation.” I still laugh my jinglebells off every time I see that. The other is “Die Hard.” There’s no way to AVOID that movie at Christmas time in Korea. It seems to be on at least one station at all times. I always enjoy the dubbed voices in that. Especially the big, black cop’s. Maybe I’ll try to watch that one today. In Korean if possible. Ah, bachelorhood… If I had kids I’m sure I’d be watching Christmas puppet movies and old Christmas cartoons over Christmas. Even the new Disney stuff. I’m one of maybe 3 people on Earth who has never seen “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Maybe if I had kids… Anyhoo, I figured why not squeeze in one last Christmassy blog entry just under the wire? So here goes:
I don’t have any kids, yet, whose minds I need to prepare, (not to say tenderize), for their futures. But if, like me, you sometimes wonder at the ability of people to maintain hope in this crazy world, I think we have Christmas to thank, (or blame, depending on your viewpoint), for that. At least partially. Not so much the actual meaning behind the season, that of Jesus who gave hope to the world, no it’s the bastardization of our highest holy holiday that I think teaches kids how to have hope, faith and belief in the impossible.
Consider Jesus. His life was miraculous. Healing the sick; making the blind see again; walking on water; turning water into wine; feeding the 5000; calming the seas; making the lame walk; raising the dead and actually rising from the dead himself. For many years in Canada, and other Christmas-celebrating countries, the birth of Jesus, his virgin miracle if you will, was remembered, celebrated, sung about etc. etc. at Christmas time. Christ is the savior and it was Christ’s mass. I’m sure you all knew that. People taught their kids about Jesus too and most Christians learned when they were very young and believed their whole lives. When I said, “belief in the impossible” a paragraph ago, I wasn’t talking about Jesus. He was the son of God. There’s no impossible and I won’t quote all the Bible verses to that effect.
Who knows, maybe the world started changing and our forefathers found that the kids needed better training to prepare them for more modern problems they would have to deal with as adults. And then came Santa Claus. This past year Santa had roughly 463,800,000 stops to make in his journey. In the 10 hours of night across the world when kids in Christmas-celebrating countries have sugarplums dancing in their heads Santa would have 0.000078 seconds to get down the chimney, unload the loot, read the thank-you letters, eat the cookies, give the carrots to the reindeer and leave each house he visited. And speaking of the snacks, if Santa ate 3 Oreos and drank one cup of milk at each house, he’d consume 137,700,000,000 calories in that ten-hour tour. By the end of his trip, with 3500 calories in a pound of fat, Santa will have ballooned to about 37.5 million pounds. Nobody likes a skinny Santa. But with chimneys a fraction of the size they used to be, he’ll need a pretty twiggy figure. Good news though, experts calculate that the exercise he does during his yearly workday should burn off about a billion calories. For the other 136 billion I heard he’s got a Stairmaster at the North Pole.
All due respect to our lord and savior, Jesus, but that Santa is pretty amazing! But even HIS story is not the “belief in the impossible” I mentioned two paragraphs ago. I am constantly gobsmacked by the unflinching poise with which people today, not ONLY when they’re young, can put any hope in the steady stream of things they are told that rival the Santa story in spectacular improbability. You don’t know what I’m talking about? Well here’s a late Christmas present: a bouquet of B.S. “You can do anything you put your mind to.” "Cheaters never prosper." "I wouldn't change a thing about you." “No, you will not be locked into that agreement for two years.” “Because we care about the customer.” “We are fighting in parliament to help all Canadians.” “I love you.” “I want a man who’s honest.” “I want a woman who’s smart.” “It’s just business.” “This flight will only cost you $399.” “You need a degree or certificate to learn that.” “We can’t hire you if you don’t have the proper certification.” "For your protection" "For your convenience" "Corporations are people." “We’re all the same.” “We’re all unique.” “Deluxe” “I’ve only had one drink.” “We can still be friends.” “The price of _____ is going down.” “We’ll need your signature for that.” “It’s free!” “You’re free!” “We’re very happy.” “How are you?” “Have a good day.” “Merry Christmas.”
You get the idea. It’s hard to go a whole day without hearing someone tell you a tale just as unlikely as Santa Claus. But we’ve been prepared for it. We are conditioned from childhood to believe in the lost cause. The underdog. The impossible. And maybe it’s because that’s what we need. We need to believe in something or we’ll lose hope. Having a truly successful life may be the biggest long shot ever. But it was something people worked towards not so long ago. We seem to be getting away from it. You see, unlike the Jesus story, we learn as we get older that Santa isn’t real and we stop believing in him. And when life kicks the living shit out of you by the time you’re trapped in a loveless marriage complete with the responsibility of 3 kids and a massive mortgage you need to work two crappy jobs to pay every month maybe you stop believing that nonsense about a happy existence for a while. But then along comes Christmas and for a few weeks that belief finds its way back into your heart. You become more positive about things. You take joy in being with friends and family and giving. But for the other 48 or 49 weeks it’s back to reality. It’s the NEW and IMPROVED Christmas. Well BAH Humbug!
The snow has brought Victoria to a virtual stand-still. I think I’m going to settle in for a long winter’s nap and see if, against all the odds, I can go a whole day without any B.S. And it is my hearty holiday wish that you can do the same! Happy Martin Luther King Day and Lunar New Year. And Merry Lunar Christmas!
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Friday, January 13, 2012
Protection is Dangerous and Science is Unscientific
It's been a couple weeks since I posted. I appologize to my legions of readers who depend upon my weekly complaints. Today I sit here still not sure what to talk about. I guess I get too many things ponging around in my head over two full weeks without venting. I'll try my best.
I recently read one of the articles of the year in the National Post and it's subject was just another of many things I've been railing about in here before: overprotection. More specifically, in Canadian schools where fears of lawsuits, obsessions with safety and fixation on image, (and outperforming other schools on the STUPID standardized tests), lead to insanities far beyond the substitution of actual education for teaching to the test. So many examples were given! A ban on peanut butter and peanut butter substitutes; a hugging ban in a London, Ont. school; a kindergartener in Laval, Quebec punished for bringing his lunch in a plastic bag rather than a reusable plastic container; a choir teacher told he has to stop touching all students; an Ottawa teacher told he couldn't use replica guns for a Remembrance Day ceremony; supervised recess in which some students aren't allowed to RUN; and the most famous one, the school that banned the use of all balls because a parent was hit in the head with one and got a mild concussion.
American Mom, Lenore Skenazy, who was voted America's worst Mom for allowing her 9-year-old son to ride the subway alone says, "We have become a society that views everything through a prism of risk." Is it the same in Canada? Is the universalist policy of blanket solutions in schools across our country the same paranoid reaction we will be letigiously applying to our adults? Will be? Are we already? And has the corporately successful anxiety fostered to our south gone airborne and infected its way into the mainstream of Canada?
Come to think of it, I wouldn't have a job now if it weren't for rich people living in dread of losing their excess. So I probably shouldn't slag it so badly. But I will anyway. Think of all the things you do every single day that require trust. Just about any of them could, with the right, (or wrong), legal representation, be turned into a lucrative lawsuit if the person or people trusted proved untrustworthy. I probably trust many thousands of individual people every day. In the morning, (or for me in the evening), I wake up to an alarm I trust will go off at the right time. I turn on the tap in the shower trusting the water heater will work and the water won't have any toxic chemicals in it. I use soap that has been passed by the, (hopefully un-bribed), Canadian Standards of Approval board. I just trust that it won't burn my skin or give me a rash. I put on clothes I believe will not unravel as I walk down the street. I wait for a bus I trust will pick me up. I have faith the driver won't jerk the wheel and drive us all into oncoming traffic in a fit of suicidal rage. I use the elevator to get to my office and hope the cables don't break. I cross the street to the mall and hope someone doesn't speed up to hit me with his/her car. I could go on and on and on.
The point is, if we get too carried away with this mistrust we'll go bonkers. Without trust our society would come to a grinding halt and we'd all be Howard Hugheses saving our urine and growing our fingernails. Sometimes we trust people and we get burned. So we can't be senselessly trusting. But let's not just stop trusting everyone or we'll lose one of the nicest things about this country, and about life. Nobody would ever fall in love if there were no trust. Think of how many of our parents would have been too scared to meet; how many corny movies and awesome songs wouldn't have been made; how many inventions would not have been thought of by people with love, (in all its forms), as their ulterior motive for creativity. If every part of Canada adopted the big city "I don't know you and I don't care" attitude I'd just go the hell back to Asia. Thank goodness, we still haven't but I've seen a lot more of it since my return.
Smarten up Canada. This is something we DON'T want to import from other countries.
Another article I read about that just bolstered a long cherished mistrust of science was about a prominent Dutch social psychologist named Diederik Stapel faking results on dozens of well respected, "scientific" experiments. It just goes to show how stupid it is to try to statistically analyze human behaviour. It's like trying to mathematically learn how to speak a language. You'd have to imagine every conceivable social setting, everything that could be said to you in such a setting and then memorize them all. The retrieval necessary might even be beyond computer capacity never mind the brain. Trying to understand human behaviour by analyzing a hundred billion people in one social setting still couldn't get all the possible variables. And it's all dependant upon mood, geography, religion, laws, environment, sex, and about a zillion other variables. Even testing one person in the same setting a hundred times wouldn't result in a dependable prediction of behaviour. A vast amount of what we are trained to believe, and are religiously obedient in believing IS scientific, is just not. And more and more people are braving the scoffing and scorn of the mass Soma-sanguine conformists and actually speaking out against the religion of science.
It is now, (finally), gaining popularity to believe that any claim coming from an observational study is most likely to be wrong in the sense that it will not replicate itself rigorously. This depends upon that. This is a rarity scientifically speaking. True dependancies like that are SO rare that for a long time "trust-me" science has spent time and money investigating, (and proporting as fact), the false ones. Indeed, modern psychologists have so much flexibility with numbers and statistics they can literally prove anything according to "False Positive Psychology" published by a trio of leading American researchers. Researchers are more likely to find false evedince that an effect exists than they are to correctly find evidence that it doesn't. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. This has been the mainstay of guys like Dawkins and other atheists like the recently departed, (and canonized (eye roll)), Hitchens, in quite spuriously creating "evidence" that God does not exist.
Jonah Lehrer wrote, "Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true." People still choose what to believe after the experiments are all done.
I recently talked with two brothers who are obviously very knowledgeable in some of the abstract areas that have been scientized of quantum physics or quantum mechanics, which is essentially the same thing as formulaic language acquisition or human behaviour only on a MUCH more massive scale. This is the "science" of providing a mathematical description of particle and wave behaviour in energy and matter. Most of our conversation was taking place about 5 feet above my head but the gist of it all was after two lifetimes of study their conclusions were that the very building blocks of all quantum physics are highly nebulous. And they are very close to proving that. That is, they are working on scientific proof that science is very unscientific.
I can't wait till that study comes out. It won't matter much in that people will still believe in what we call science, it'll just be exposed for the religious faith it actually is. Most of it anyway. And that'll be nice. At least that's the way I see it.
I recently read one of the articles of the year in the National Post and it's subject was just another of many things I've been railing about in here before: overprotection. More specifically, in Canadian schools where fears of lawsuits, obsessions with safety and fixation on image, (and outperforming other schools on the STUPID standardized tests), lead to insanities far beyond the substitution of actual education for teaching to the test. So many examples were given! A ban on peanut butter and peanut butter substitutes; a hugging ban in a London, Ont. school; a kindergartener in Laval, Quebec punished for bringing his lunch in a plastic bag rather than a reusable plastic container; a choir teacher told he has to stop touching all students; an Ottawa teacher told he couldn't use replica guns for a Remembrance Day ceremony; supervised recess in which some students aren't allowed to RUN; and the most famous one, the school that banned the use of all balls because a parent was hit in the head with one and got a mild concussion.
American Mom, Lenore Skenazy, who was voted America's worst Mom for allowing her 9-year-old son to ride the subway alone says, "We have become a society that views everything through a prism of risk." Is it the same in Canada? Is the universalist policy of blanket solutions in schools across our country the same paranoid reaction we will be letigiously applying to our adults? Will be? Are we already? And has the corporately successful anxiety fostered to our south gone airborne and infected its way into the mainstream of Canada?
Come to think of it, I wouldn't have a job now if it weren't for rich people living in dread of losing their excess. So I probably shouldn't slag it so badly. But I will anyway. Think of all the things you do every single day that require trust. Just about any of them could, with the right, (or wrong), legal representation, be turned into a lucrative lawsuit if the person or people trusted proved untrustworthy. I probably trust many thousands of individual people every day. In the morning, (or for me in the evening), I wake up to an alarm I trust will go off at the right time. I turn on the tap in the shower trusting the water heater will work and the water won't have any toxic chemicals in it. I use soap that has been passed by the, (hopefully un-bribed), Canadian Standards of Approval board. I just trust that it won't burn my skin or give me a rash. I put on clothes I believe will not unravel as I walk down the street. I wait for a bus I trust will pick me up. I have faith the driver won't jerk the wheel and drive us all into oncoming traffic in a fit of suicidal rage. I use the elevator to get to my office and hope the cables don't break. I cross the street to the mall and hope someone doesn't speed up to hit me with his/her car. I could go on and on and on.
The point is, if we get too carried away with this mistrust we'll go bonkers. Without trust our society would come to a grinding halt and we'd all be Howard Hugheses saving our urine and growing our fingernails. Sometimes we trust people and we get burned. So we can't be senselessly trusting. But let's not just stop trusting everyone or we'll lose one of the nicest things about this country, and about life. Nobody would ever fall in love if there were no trust. Think of how many of our parents would have been too scared to meet; how many corny movies and awesome songs wouldn't have been made; how many inventions would not have been thought of by people with love, (in all its forms), as their ulterior motive for creativity. If every part of Canada adopted the big city "I don't know you and I don't care" attitude I'd just go the hell back to Asia. Thank goodness, we still haven't but I've seen a lot more of it since my return.
Smarten up Canada. This is something we DON'T want to import from other countries.
Another article I read about that just bolstered a long cherished mistrust of science was about a prominent Dutch social psychologist named Diederik Stapel faking results on dozens of well respected, "scientific" experiments. It just goes to show how stupid it is to try to statistically analyze human behaviour. It's like trying to mathematically learn how to speak a language. You'd have to imagine every conceivable social setting, everything that could be said to you in such a setting and then memorize them all. The retrieval necessary might even be beyond computer capacity never mind the brain. Trying to understand human behaviour by analyzing a hundred billion people in one social setting still couldn't get all the possible variables. And it's all dependant upon mood, geography, religion, laws, environment, sex, and about a zillion other variables. Even testing one person in the same setting a hundred times wouldn't result in a dependable prediction of behaviour. A vast amount of what we are trained to believe, and are religiously obedient in believing IS scientific, is just not. And more and more people are braving the scoffing and scorn of the mass Soma-sanguine conformists and actually speaking out against the religion of science.
It is now, (finally), gaining popularity to believe that any claim coming from an observational study is most likely to be wrong in the sense that it will not replicate itself rigorously. This depends upon that. This is a rarity scientifically speaking. True dependancies like that are SO rare that for a long time "trust-me" science has spent time and money investigating, (and proporting as fact), the false ones. Indeed, modern psychologists have so much flexibility with numbers and statistics they can literally prove anything according to "False Positive Psychology" published by a trio of leading American researchers. Researchers are more likely to find false evedince that an effect exists than they are to correctly find evidence that it doesn't. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. This has been the mainstay of guys like Dawkins and other atheists like the recently departed, (and canonized (eye roll)), Hitchens, in quite spuriously creating "evidence" that God does not exist.
Jonah Lehrer wrote, "Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true." People still choose what to believe after the experiments are all done.
I recently talked with two brothers who are obviously very knowledgeable in some of the abstract areas that have been scientized of quantum physics or quantum mechanics, which is essentially the same thing as formulaic language acquisition or human behaviour only on a MUCH more massive scale. This is the "science" of providing a mathematical description of particle and wave behaviour in energy and matter. Most of our conversation was taking place about 5 feet above my head but the gist of it all was after two lifetimes of study their conclusions were that the very building blocks of all quantum physics are highly nebulous. And they are very close to proving that. That is, they are working on scientific proof that science is very unscientific.
I can't wait till that study comes out. It won't matter much in that people will still believe in what we call science, it'll just be exposed for the religious faith it actually is. Most of it anyway. And that'll be nice. At least that's the way I see it.