So this post is for Zach.

Here're pictures of the 'stuff'. The bodies have all been well wrapped up, so odor should be minimal.






On that note, I'm off to Maryland for the weekend, where the Robbiness resides.

Escaping discorporation and flaming death, against all odds, I have arrived, despite the best attempts of sentinel fleets and Russian nuclear warheads and raving demons from Sheogh.

Thank you to Joel and Jem and Johnson and Junyuan and Colin and Hanwen(I just wanted to put the 'J's together) and family, for being at the airport. Thank you, Ernest. Thank you all, for your well-wishes, and your not-so-well wishes, and your downright-evil wishes.

On the other hand, it is good to be back here. Lammermyre (his name until I think of a better one) is trying to get me to play World of Warcraft. So I arrived late last night, and immediately had it forced upon me, like a big fat really ugly German with a small penis forces himself upon a little boy, crying alone in the dark alley. Poor little boy. All he wanted was some food for his family, and medicine for his sick sister.

So, anyway, I made myself a human Warlock named Malagir. Take note of the name: it took us something like a full hour of discussion to come up with it, after discarding such worthy candidates as IPwnz0rXj00 and Nefertitties. Apparently, Malagir was a angsty, emo kid, sensitive and quiet. All his life, his greatest regret was that his family was not all gruesomely murdered in some Scourge raid, and so he had to pretend to the tragic greatness he felt he deserved. Resenting his contented, happy family for their contentment, happiness and lack of general tragedy, he turned to the dark arts, figuring that that's what sensitive poet people do. Dying his hair black and taking the name Malagir (meaning Son of Sickness, in his own made up language loosely based upon a little bit of Elvish and some Gnome), he attached himself to Jethon the mage, and now seeks to die in some terrible accident.

I really don't hate angsty people. I just like making fun of them. And of people in general.

For now, however, like the little boy being raped by the Prussian, I am hungry and must go find food. Food of happiness and delight.

Goodnight stars and goodnight moon,

I hope to see you very soon.

Farewell, and farewell, and fare you well.

Ladies and gents, friends, mormons, countrymen, ninjas, beloved reindeer, members of the audience,

I will be leaving the sunny land of Singapura for the wild, untamed Americas on Tuesday, the 25th of July, Anno Domini 2006. The carriage of the skies will depart as the sun rises, at 720am, and will be known by the name United Airlines, and it will touch the groundat 847pm, at Castle Dulles.



What rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethelhem to be born?

So this is what I saw today. In case you can't read it, it's cherry flavored cranberries. In case you actually wanted cherries anyway, but for some reason are eating cranberries.


In other news, I finally gathered the right conjunction of events such that I got my visa. I'm -finally- leaving for the Americas. Either Monday or Tuesday, the 24th or 25th, 720am, United Airlines. There will be so much debauchery and alcoholism and drugs that I'm not sure I will survive. But it'll be a good kind of dying.

Gyges is a shepherd, a simple man who dreamt of sheep and little things. One day, there is a great storm, and a bolt of lightning strikes open a fissure upon the earth. When the storm has passed, Gyges wanders into the fissure, curious about its contents. Within, he finds the body of a giant, upon whose finger lies a golden ring. Gyges takes this ring and places it upon his finger, and soon discovers that it gives him the power of invisibility. He quickly arranges to have an audience with the king, whereupon he uses the power of the ring to kill the king and assume his throne. He marries the queen, and becomes the most powerful man in the kingdom.

This is the story from Plato's The Republic, and is supposed to constitute an argument for the superiority of injustice over justice. It is argued that we are just and good only because we cannot get away with being unjust and evil. If we could, we would.

Ask yourself this: Would you rather be a good man, and thought to be evil by all, or would you rather be evil, but thought to be good?

Put another way, if there were no rewards for goodness, but purely punishment, would you be good?

I want to say that the right thing would be to choose goodness, even if there were no rewards, this world or the next. However, I understand the position laid out in the story of the Ring of Gyges is a difficult one to refute. After all, what conceivable reason could we have for being good, if it only brought about disadvantage? I offer here a sketch of an answer, a version of Plato's response.

Plato (famously) said that No evil can come to good men. Taken in the modern context, this seems absurd. After all, we can just look around us and see good men getting cancer and going bankrupt and losing their jobs. We can see evil men with happy families and nice cars.

I think this involves a confusion about what goodness and evil is. A good man, in the full sense, is a man with a good life, not just a good character. The full flourishing human life is one that involves both the virtues of character as well as serendipity in the events of his life. The man who is good of character but hated by everyone, and thought to be evil, is not leading a blessed life. We aspire to be like him only in the sense that we want to develop character traits he has. We do not desire his life. His life is, in the full sense, not good, not blessed, not fully flourishing.

The choice then is clear. We want to be good. We want to lead good lives. Goodness cannot admit evil. It will not. We want a good life, which involves a multitude of things: developing courage and patience and honesty and temperance, having a good family, having loyal friends, sufficient funds, and so on. All these are things to be cultivated; to lose sight of this is the obsession with character traits is a sad, sad, mistake.

Consider, furthermore, that advantage and disadvantage seem to be the wrong kinds of considerations in discussions of virtue. Virtue is a good thing, in the same way happiness is a good thing: simply because it is. We don't want happiness for the sake of something else, happiness is good in itself. Similarly, we don't want virtue for the sake of something else, because virtue is a good in itself. In contrast, we have, for instance, taking medicine, which is something not good for itself, but because it brings about other good things.

So, dear reader, be good. Be courageous, and patient, and honest, and true. Be generous, love your family, have loyal friends. Be good, be good, and no evil can come upon you.

In reverse chronology, because my trans-temporal galt-constant modulator is malfunctioning.

1) I got my ass whooped good by Ernest at Solitaire Showdown. Don't ask why we're playing. I suspect he's haXX0ring my computer. I don't know why I suck so bad at it.

2) Met Becks and watched a weird French film with Monica Bellucci. The above sentence is deliberately ambiguous. Now you'll never know whether I watched the movie accompanied by a famous Italian actress, or with the metrosexual (former) captain of the English team, or both. Much nudity was had, and we eventually wandered into HMV and got a copy of INVADER ZIM, season 2. Awesome. Gir must have tacos, or he'll explode!

3) Had a good steak dinner with the family. It's one of those weird coffee-shop things, but surprisingly good. It's not the regular Singapore "western food" fare. This is real good stuff. The chilli dog was massive, and the 300grams of rare ribeye was heavenly. Thank God for cows. And fire. Especially fire. Fire deserves to be in bold. For no real good reason.

4) Stayover at chez Link. The usual watching of random stuff, humping, made more amusing by our corkscrew ninja adventure, starring me, Captain Awesome, and Bugger. Our patience was tested as we waited for hours for the Guardian of the Kitchen to fall asleep. From shadow to shadow we then flitted, risking capture and torture for the sake of attaining the Holy Corkscrew. Grapey beverages were had, with me and Bugger sharing a full bottle of happiness. Kirby had a cup too, and Bugger ended up very, very hammered. His subsequent activities will be released in the sequel to the famous gay porn movie, Buggery: Catch your wave.


That's it for now, folks. Gotta go fix my modulator.





That's not a euphemism for what you're thinking. Get your mind out of the gutter. Perverts.

So all the cool people in the world have been playing Heroes of Might and Magic V recently. Specifically, I have.

So, anyway, I was on the last mission for the good campaign, and I have these huge groups of Paladins and Priests and Archangels, which are the top tier units. To get a sense of how many I have, you can get a maximum of 2 archangels per 7 game turns, and that's after building the right buildings (in this case a cathedral) and having the amount of resources. So I had something like 50 archangels, and a hundred Priests and Paladins, and I was feeling cocky. (A little like when I made a certain bet with Johnson...)

I waltz up to the opponent's base, and charge in without bothering to scout it out, certain of victory.

And I see that the opponent has 400 Pit Lords, which are the evil equivalent of my Archangels. 400 to my 50. They have 3000 Hell Hounds. 3. Frickin. Thousand. Another 1000 imps, 800 or so Nightmares. It was a massacre.



Moral of the story: Sometimes, even being Awesome can't save you from stupidity.

Strange things happen to me, and I am left to wonder if I am the only person who experiences these things. Every now and then, events in my life would cascade in a pattern, each piece randomly falling into place to form the suggestion of some larger picture. Being the kind of person I am, even such a shadow the possibility of something new to know is irresistable. At least until the next shiny thing comes along.

Recently, the issue seems to be Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. I'm seeing echoes of it everywhere, and the randommest (yay new word) conversations would suddenly involve it. So, in an effort at catharsis, I will blabber a little about it here.

Godel proves that any sufficiently rich system, if consistent, cannot be complete. I use 'consistent' and 'complete' here technically, to mean the following:

A system is consistent if there is no statement within that system that can be proven both true and false.
A system is complete if every statement within that system can be proven either true or false.

Godel's original formulation is as such:
To every ω-consistent recursive class κ of formulae there correspond recursive class signs r, such that neither v Gen r nor Neg(v Gen r) belongs to Flg(κ) (where v is the free variable of r).

Of course, this is incomprehensible gibberish. I am proud to say that there was a point in time when I understood the full proof, but ashamed to say that I can't even remember what Gen refers to.

A better formulation might be this:
Any consistent system (of at least a basic level of complexity) is incomplete.

This means that, for instance, elementary arithmetic is incomplete. There are statements within elementary arithmetic that cannot be proven either true or false, using the rules of elementary arithmetic itself. This applies for just about any system you can imagine. Consider the implications for our self-knowledge, or for AI. Even if we manage to straighten out all the kinks in the works and arrive at a clean, consistent system that represents our minds or an artificial mind, there would be propositions within the system that cannot be shown to be true or false within the system itself! So much for the dream of downloading our consciousnesses into a software replica, to live forever in a digital world. We cannot represent ourselves totally!

Consider the following example; It's a fair translation of Godel's proof into something normal people can understand. To be clear, Godel's proof is far, far, more rigorous, written as it is in first-order logic and mathematics. If you desire to find out more, let me know, I'll be happy to share.

1. Someone introduces Gödel to a UTM, a machine that is supposed to be a Universal Truth Machine, capable of correctly answering any question at all.
2. Gödel asks for the program and the circuit design of the UTM. The program may be complicated, but it can only be finitely long. Call the program P(UTM) for Program of the Universal Truth Machine.
3. Smiling a little, Gödel writes out the following sentence: "The machine constructed on the basis of the program P(UTM) will never say that this sentence is true." Call this sentence G for Gödel. Note that G is equivalent to: "UTM will never say G is true."
4. Now Gödel laughs his high laugh and asks UTM whether G is true or not.
5. If UTM says G is true, then "UTM will never say G is true" is false. If "UTM will never say G is true" is false, then G is false (since G = "UTM will never say G is true"). So if UTM says G is true, then G is in fact false, and UTM has made a false statement. So UTM will never say that G is true, since UTM makes only true statements.
6. We have established that UTM will never say G is true. So "UTM will never say G is true" is in fact a true statement. So G is true (since G = "UTM will never say G is true").
7. "I know a truth that UTM can never utter," Gödel says. "I know that G is true. UTM is not truly universal."
   

-Rucker, Infinity and the Mind

It's a little tough to wrap your mind completely around, but if you do, grasping it should feel a little in the nature of a revelation.

Sunday evening was spent at Ben's place, watching the France-Italy finals. Seeing Zidane get sent off for head-butting was certainly entertaining, but more entertaining was having Zhirong try to describe what a female orgasm involved. More entertainment involving Zhirong involved commandeering his MSN account and professing his love to Charisia. Who promptly logged off in sheer terror, understandably.

Dinner with Zhiming, Andy, David and Junx, and spent most of the time discussing artificial intelligence and the ramifications, as well as the possibility of proof of its existence and nature. It was suggested that it is, in principle, impossible to prove that any AI is exactly like a human intelligence. (I don't know if I got the formulation right) It's clearly an extension of Godel's Incompleteness Proof, which I've mentioned in a previous entry. Using the system of human intelligence, can we ever show that X (where X is a system of AI) is a replica of a system of human intelligence? It seems like there is a proof that it cannot. The implications are mind-boggling.

I was thinking about writing a little about the Incompleteness Proof here, or about the Ring of Gyges, but the hour is late, and the witching hour grows nigh. Not that I have any idea what witches do with all that nigh, but I guess it's important. So, dear reader, I will sign off here with Yeat's The Second Coming, from which I draw the url of this very site. Pay especial (this should be a word) to the last two lines. Enjoy.


Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

-W.B. Yeats

Band concert was highly entertaining.

I'm friends with a pirate. 'Nuff said.

Talking to Ilya Farber at Logicmills yesterday resurrected my frustration against reductionism. Here's my angry splashing of my thoughts out upon the electronic world, in the hope that some clearer echo might return.

The Problem
First off, I'm very much attracted to Trenton Merricks' argument for eliminativism. Consider a left glove and a right glove on a table. How many objects are there on that table? A proper answer, it seems, is two -- a left glove, and a right glove. One would be a strange answer -- a pair of gloves. Three would be just completely bizarre -- a left glove, a right glove, AND a pair of gloves. It seems that that bizarreness might spring from our intuitive understanding that 'a pair of gloves' does not exist in the same sense as the individual gloves do. The 'pair of gloves' is, in some sense, just in our heads.

Consider then a regular table, or chair. I point to it, and ask, how many objects are there? We know (I assume more people accept this) that the table is composed of many smaller particles, be they atoms or quarks or whatnot. Let say the table is composed of a zillion atoms. A proper answer might be: a zillion. The 'table' is just like the 'pair of gloves' -- both seem to only have existence in our minds, as a grouping of things. Surely, we cannot say that there are a zillion and one objects there: a zillion atoms, AND a table.

We note that this means everyday objects do not exist. If they have no causal power above and beyond their parts, existence becomes meaningless. Chairs don't exist, tables don't exist, that bus doesn't exist, that building doesn't exist. People, I'll put aside for now. Merricks wants to say that people have causal powers more than the sum of their parts, and therefore exist. I'm not sure where I stand on that though.

On the other hand, I am also very attracted to Aristotle's virtue ethics, which demand the existence of people. His function argument (and the modern version of it, Phillipa Foot's) further demands the existence of hammers and knives and animals. The idea is this: that ethics is about what it is to be a good man. A good hammer hammers well, because the function of hammers is to hammer. A good knife cuts well, because the function of a knife is to cut. The function of a man is to think, be rational, and therefore, a good man thinks well. There is no change in the meaning of 'good' as applied to 'a good oak tree' or 'a good person'.

Clearly, this argument cannot work if there are no such things as hammers or knives, or oak trees. If arete, or telos, can only be applied to people, then we need some other argument to arrive at what it is to be good.

A Sketch of a Solution
Tentatively, I will accept that most (maybe all) things are reducible, either to simple parts or reducible ad infinitum. After all, it seems pretty clear that the 'pair of gloves' really is just left glove plus right glove, and nothing else, just like the table is just Atom 1 + Atom 2 + Atom 3 ... + Atom Zillion, and nothing else. There is no extra weird entity of 'a pair' or 'a table' that pops into existence when you put those parts together.

At the same time, it is not meaningless to talk of tables, and pairs of gloves. After all, if we mean ANYTHING at all by 'exist', we mean that tables exist. We are interested, usually, in what the soccer ball did to that window, rather than the interaction of these zillion atoms on these other zillion atoms. When we seek explanations, we seek explanations about wholes, rather than parts. The whole must have some sort of existence.

Maybe the right way to think about this is that existence an incredibly rich concept, rather than the sad little thing some metaphysicians seem to want it to be. We use it loosely, but when the context changes, the meaning changes. When we say "Quarks exist", we use a different sense of 'exist' from when we say "Democracy exists". Perhaps, democracy can be reduced to the total sum of the concept of democracy held in the brains by all sentient beings, and then further reduced to brain states, and then further reduced to quarks. Perhaps.

But there is something wrong with this process! I still can't put my finger on what exactly it is. Which step fails? Argh.

But for now, tow huey calls. And one does not refuse the siren cry of tow huey.

Cor meum conturbatum est in me
et formido mortis cecidit super me
Timor et tremor venit super me
et contexit me tenebrae
Et dixit: quis dabit mihi pinnas sicut columbae
et volabo, et requiescam.

My heart is sore pained within me
The fear of death falls upon me
Fear and trembling have seized me
And covered me in darkness
And I say: would that I could have the wings of a dove
That I could fly far, and be at rest.

It's just one of those days. Bad embassy experience in the morning, and NO VISA, followed by some amusing Logicmills stuff and work, and then a very good dinner with the fencing guys. There's something about old friends you haven't seen in a while. And by old I mean like Eunice.

In other news, I am now officially friends with a pirate. *cough* Xuyang *cough* Once Laura and Stephen do the thing they say they might do on their livejournal, then I'll be friends with 3 pirates! It'll be like the Triumvirate of Awesomeness of the High Seas.

Now where are my ninja and zombie and robot buddies? A superhero needs good friends of this sort.

(Ernest and Daniel, the Latin part might be of amusement to both of yall, for different reasons. Enjoy.)

My flight has been postponed to Tuesday, the 11th of July. That gives me a little more breathing room, but not much. A quick update, more for my sake than for yours. Things left to do:

1) Get an I-20 from UFl. That involves me faxing a form over to them, then calling them and requesting they mail it to me by the fastest method available.

2) Get an exit permit from 6DA. I need to fax my UFl acceptance letter to them, and yell at them and get them to send me the permission slips as soon as possible. Keeping in mind that it is the frikkin Air Force.

3) Get a visa from the the American Embassy. Need to get the previous two items, filling in a bunch of forms and printing them out, and then going to the Embassy for an interview.

4) Sign over shares and power of attorney at Logicmills. This should be really quick.

5) Learning by heart the full lyrics of all Click Five songs. I wanna catch your wave.

Welcome to another post full of randomly disconnected events, thoughts, ideas and wombats.

(Wombat is a great word. Just like titmouse.)

Major issue right now is this. I have bought my United Airlines plane ticket, to leave Singapore at 720am on Friday, the 7th of July. I have contacted my friends in the States, to pick me up at the airport at the appropriate time. I have figured out more or less how to transport stuff over.

And then, today, while talking to my aunt, I realize I had completely forgotten that I need a visa. A visa, that thing they give you so you can enter America as a student rather than a refugee or a Byzantine whore. As I understand it, post 9-11, the visa application takes over a week to process. A week I don't have. Crud. So, I figured I'll call the embassy tomorrow and see what help they can offer me. Gotta turn on all my charm and animal charisma, and maybe show some leg. Show some hairy, hairy leg.

On a brighter note, the weekend has been awesome. Ran around with Kirby, bought Southpark boxers, considered making dogtags, walked way too much between Bugis and Lavender because Kirby was stubborn, met Hanwen, watched C.R.A.Z.Y., a French movie about a father and his homosexual son. Christian, Raymond, Antoine, Zac et Yvan. C'est un film tres.. unexpected. Mais je l'a (verbe enjoyer). I lose my wallet, then find it, sans cash. As consolation, the lady manager of Orchard Cineleisure gives me a Superman Returns notebook and pen. Awesome. Customer service in Singapore keeps getting better and better.

Then, stayover at Jem's is awesome, as always. Watching the World Cup matches, humping, more watching, humping, sleeping, humping, surfing the net, humping, blog-surfing, humping, playing PS games, humping. I think I gave and received more humpage in 24 hours than I have in all my previous life. That's saying something.

Then, off to Hougang (sit, Colin, sit!) to my gramma's place, then off to seafoodiness. Seafoodiness was good. Very good.


In other news, I have been busy improving relationships between Frog and Flamingo, as well as tiao bo li jian between Cheem Flamingo and Smelly Flamingo. I also agreed to buy vodka for Ernest, He who Pees in Oceans. I have also converted to Mozilla Firefox. In addition, I have decided that my mutant power will be like Adam Warlock's: Being ridiculously... good at stuff. Like ninjas.

Until next time, folks. In the meanwhile,

wombat wombat wombat titmouse badger mushroom whee. rubber ducky you're the one.