I was going to start this “dear something”, or something, but there’s nobody to write it to. Seeing as “oh dear” is a favorite saying (both in geriatric tendency and the necessary whimsical intonation), it fits.

I like to say I’ve spent nearly five years here, but with sixteen months in summers, another six a la Française, and four and change in miscellaneous holidays, I guess it’s only been 2.83. In that case maybe I’m making mountain lions out of kittens. Granted, mountain lion kittens by and large turn into mountain lions. I think that’s a fact. So it depends on the kind of kittens we’re talking about.

The last few times I’ve left somewhere it’s been to leave something behind. This time is because I can’t bear not to go somewhere else. I’m not really sure if that changes what kind of kittens they are.

Regardless of species, it may make it much easier to arrive somewhere new (which will warmly welcomed) when you desperately want to be there, but it makes leaving a place you were maybe a little bit fond of a little more difficult.

When I think about it I wasn’t really a huge fan of undergrad. I hardly remember first year in the varsity whirlwind, and I hated second year so much that I moved to France, which says something because do the French ever NOT take kindly to having foreigners dropped into their boulangeries. Fourth year was an academic success but an emotional rollercoaster. But I guess that’s what I needed to realize that having nothing to cry about is something to smile about..and that having something to smile about is nothing to cry about! (Yes, that is blatant question begging, but it’s for literary effect not a rational argument, so I’m not going to get my knickers in a twist over it)

This year’s disappeared before I was able to think of what it was. Unfortunately it probably when I found some things that I didn’t just want to throw out with the baby and the bathwater (in my opinion they can both go). If I’d just finished in four years, maybe I could have left this place angry like the rest of them and I wouldn’t be compelled to do things like write about it. Pessimism is just such a fine choice if you have the option. The aftertaste is bitter but doesn’t last as long.

In what will seem like no time at all, I will have forgotten that any of this was anything to write (home) about. Most likely, it will be a place I vaguely refer to as “near Toronto” when people ask where I did my undergrad. However, I hope where I am going people aren’t going to ask where I did my undergrad. It took going through undergrad to realize that things like undergrad, regardless of where you did them, don’t really matter. In that case, it might only cross my mind when I think of my fabulous first apartment, where the roof leaks, the heater breaks, there are bats in ceiling and the door jams don’t line up…

I assume that by the close of the year I’ll wonder why I ever cared about leaving here, but that doesn’t change that right at this instant I don’t want to not have this place around the corner. I know that to here, my insignificance is not just a possibility but a fact. Unfortunately that makes this moment now all the less palatable.

My life is about to get bigger, but before it does it’s going to get momentarily smaller. It’s that fleeting moment that I am living in and dread. Of course, the possibility of a bigger world is worth this moment, but it doesn’t make this temporary world any less uncomfortable. I am shedding my first solo home, the place where I discovered libertarianism, virtue ethics, and the true value of Tim Hortons and the company of housecats. The rational me that I have tried to hone here tells me that physical and emotional nostaligia are no more a part of you than the clothes you wear, seeing as it’s not as though I will leave my libertarian/virtue ethicist/timbit-loving/cat lady tendencies behind. Seeing as these important things will come with me regardless, the nostalgia feels next to useless, even a hindrance.

Unfortunately my rationality can’t quell the sucker.

The feelings will wane, but until then, in this grimacing lingering moment, I don’t wish that I could stay, but that I could bring so much more of here with me than I will when I go.

Well, considering there are likely hundreds of thousands of people in North America using steroids (there are probably a dozen or more at the one gym I go to here in nothing-town, Canada), and of those who use, a good percentage probably distribute. There are probably tens of thousands of people who distribute steroids (or other figure enhancement drugs) in North America, and they can barely get arrested in their own country for doing so. An international warrant would be like the high school pot dealer having a warrant for his arrest in another country. Completely absurd.

So how did Freeman get arrested in Sweden? Was he doing drugs in public? Now this is an offense that you can see that you might be arrested for in a foreign country. If it’s against their laws, you can’t do it in their country. You can drink on the street in most of Europe, but you could get arrested in North America for doing the same. Fine, so if you’re actively breaking a law in a country, you can get arrested. Fair. But Freeman was signing autographs. He wasn’t injecting drugs in front of his fans.

So let’s think about this, steroids aren’t exactly the easiest drug to hide the effect of! Functional alcoholics might fly under the radar, but bodybuilders smash the scanners. So, it’s obvious. You see a man who is 5’9, three hundred pounds, and has veins popping out of his palms? Alarm bells go off. But still, how can obvious drug use get you arrested in a country where that drug is illegal…if you’re not using it in that country?

Here’s the kicker. In Sweden, it’s illegal to have the narcotic…IN YOUR SYSTEM. Arrested individuals are subjected to a blood test where trace levels in the system are enough to get you a personal-use-minor-drug-offence, punishable by up to six months in prison. The same goes for drugs like marijuana, which also has a zero-tolerance policy in Sweden. So, if you had some marijuana in say, Amsterdam, where possession, distribution, and consumption are legal, and you flew to Sweden the next day… you could get arrested.

Its one thing (and in my opinion, not necessarily such a great one either) for a government to control trade and markets, and they can do that to some extent by trying to erase markets, such as the narcotics market. Frankly, most drug violence is caused by the illegal nature of the drug and not the effects of the drugs themselves. In other words, the real social cost of illegal drugs is guns not overdoses. However, that’s a whole other story.

The point here is that the government is controlling the substances in your body. What’s next? You could be arrested for having high LDL levels in your blood? What if you just naturally have very high levels of growth hormone and testosterone, and the next person over with naturally very low levels takes just enough to be the same as you?  Diabetics taking insulin? Just the mere thought of a government controlling your substance intake in any respect should give you shivers.

If this kind of news story doesn’t shock you, or make you uncomfortable, maybe it’s because you’re so used to it. I mean, governments already have large control your disposable income, your access to substances including food (through subsidies and other market controls), when you have to go to school and what you have to learn, what car you can drive (through individual insurance), what lines you can cross and how often (borders), and how long the grass on your lawn can grow.

Forget steroids. Maybe a few more things on the above list should make you uncomfortable.

Not really. I should qualify that, we’re all entitled to think or believe what we want; mostly because there’s not really a way for anyone to govern that. That said; it takes a lot more than ‘just feeling’ to make an opinion worth having. Opinions don’t really fall into “right” and “wrong” categories, but you can have a “bad” opinion; they might be unsupported, incoherent, or simply irrelevant.

The trouble is that we’re accustomed to a paradigm in which having an opinion, and calling it our own somehow entitles us to hold it without challenge. This is absurd. You can hold your own opinion, but I can still think that you’re wrong, and I certainly don’t have to be quiet about it (and knowing me, I probably won’t be).

We all hold opinions about everything. They are the basis of the assumptions and decisions we make, they tell us what we think is the best choice. They are founded on our knowledge and our experiences, and they are constantly changing. Some are better founded than others; more defendable, universal. We have better reasons for holding them.

There’s the rub. We can hold opinions that we don’t have much reason for holding. Every time I see a person I’ve never met or a photo of a place I’ve never been, I have an ‘opinion’ of that person or place. I’ve got some basic reasons for feeling the way I do, but they’re pretty weak. I would never try to argue the validity of my opinion. I probably wouldn’t even say it out loud. I certainly would not expect anyone to agree with me. Most importantly, these are the opinions that are easily changed. Someone who knew that same place or person better than I did or had more relevant knowledge than me would have a better opinion.  I could learn something from them and edit and update my viewpoint. Knowledge is in no small part about striving for good, well supported opinions on as much one can. We have to recognize when we hold opinions for no good reason, and why this makes them no good opinions.

This is why knowledge depends on discussion. If we want to expand your breadth of experience and the depth of our beliefs, we have to talk about them so that we can develop reasons for holding them. Encouraging people to challenge the opinions of others is a way to develop both of them, and we’re unfortunately going to discover that we hold a lot of bad, unsupported opinions.

Here’s the best way to catch yourself: When we start sentences with “I just think”, or “I just feel”, we’ve already qualified the rest of your sentence as not particularly well supported. We are disclaiming responsibility for the statement we’re about to make. It’s saying “please don’t challenge this”. Let’s try to say “I think”, not “I just think”. We shouldn’t settle for holding opinions that we can’t defend or support.

We should invite the discussion and risk the potential upheaval of our beliefs. What is left standing will be much more valuable.

Cryptosporidium, Giardia, Clostridium, Legionella, Salmonella and Hepatitus A.

I think they’re good reasons.

These genera of microorganisms (the last one is a virus) are just a very tiny sampling of some lovely little critters that are found in pretty normal water. Listen up “natural food movement”. These are not chemicals, they are not “man made additives”, or results of “processing”. They are exactly the opposite. These microorganisms are about as “natural” as it gets. Single celled, hundreds of millions of years in the making, and enough of them will kill the crap out of you. That’s not just a figure of speech, a lot of waterborne pathogens keep you from holding anything in your intestines.

Recent events (actually, they’re daily events, but some get on the news more than others), have got me thinking about water. The recent Cholera outbreak in Haiti will tell you the tragedy of what happens when you can’t process your water. The lack of water treatment literally plagues all of civilization that doesn’t have it, and it’s not a “modern” problem. Untreated water, depending on where it comes from, usually won’t harm every person, but it is enough of a challenge for the bodies of the young, the old, and the ill to keep populations small and stagnant. The increase in human population that came with the development of cities and civilizations was directly correlated to water technology.

Wastewater treatment could be the single most important everyday technology that has allowed developed countries to become well, developed (along with the plough). A large part of what allowed the Roman empire to become so successful was the construction of huge waterways that carried clean water from the mountains to the cities. Why the mountains? When water condenses and then rains or falls as snow to these high altitudes, it doesn’t carry very many pathogens with it. Storing water in the form of ice or cold water on top of mountains is also pretty beneficial, because it’s too cold for most of these things to live. Then, it trickled down in fast moving streams and straight to the cities via enormous aquaducts. The Romans understood this (though not in those terms), and this is why even in cities that were on lakes and rivers, the Romans built ways to get water from higher ground. After being used by the cities, the water washed away the wastes to fester in the sea, where the salt content actually keeps the water pretty “clean”. Most bacteria, like people, can’t drink salt water.

Modern infrastructure to clean water is phenomenal. It could be the most ingenious mix of using plants, bacteria, manmade chemicals and filters to provide what we get on tap. Processes range from chemical scrubbing of pipes, massive filtering and oxygenation of water, to my favorite “activated sludge”, only because it sounds like something a supervillian would create. Look it up, it’s gross, but it probably has saved your life once a week or so during your lifetime.

Where you don’t have water, you don’t have anything. While there are a lot of pesky little suckers that like to live in water, it’s not the case that they “shouldn’t” be there, you just shouldn’t drink a lot of them. What lets us live in urban cities, arid climates, and have the enormous flexibility we do in the developed world relies largely on the fact that we can turn on a tap and get processed, unnatural, modified, additive filled, water. This is the healthiest water can be, even if you compared it to what you could suck from the clouds.

Next time you think about the arguments against resource processing, processed or modified foods, or any argument that “natural” is better. Think of water.

What would you say is the best thing about the internet?

How about this?

You’re telling someone about a youtube video you saw the day before and they’re looking at you like a dog hearing a high pitched noise, because it’s one of those “had to be there” moments, and the fact that you’ve just said “you kinda had to be there” is just making things worse…and you’re afraid that if you swallow your words any faster you’ll need a laxative to get them out later…you can pull out your smart phone and there it is. Watermelon to the face. Everybody loves it. Social suicide avoided.

So it’s pretty neat that you can look up anything at any time.

What about this?

Your friend is vacationing in Cuba while you scrape icicles from your eyelashes, and you’re totally jealous. The only thing that could possibly make you feel better is if she got a third degree sunburn and you think you’d look better in her swimsuit. Luckily, she posted 349 photos yesterday.

So it’s kinda cool how everyone you know is on it.

How about this?

There’s a microbiologist in Hong Kong and a geneticist in California…and a chemist in Germany and a student in New York and a guy in his basement and two billion other people on the internet. They’re all free to talk to eachother. Anytime. Well maybe not the guy in Chengdu, but the rest of us are. It’s the only place on Earth with millions of new ideas every minute. Granted, that’s quantity not quality, but I believe in laws of large numbers.

The fact that anybody can put up an iphone app, provide any service they can think of for five bucks (if you haven’t already, check out fiverr.com), or write a mediocre blog means the unlimited proliferation of ideas, services, processes, information.

Open sourced innovation is the most magnificent thing that the internet is giving us.

To live in this age, where for the time being the forces that will try to regulate and muzzle the internet can’t keep up with it, is nothing less than spectacular.

A couple of years ago, I was talking with him about how stereoisomers can have completely different properties even though they are made of exactly the same elements. What? Is that not what everyone talks to their parents about? My father the irrefutable lawyer said “No I don’t believe that”. Not “oh really?” or “Are you sure?” Simply “no”.

It is precisely because my father is not an idiot that he looked at his then eighteen year old daughter’s second-year-university face and said to himself “nothing she says can be thought to have any factual accuracy”. It sounds harsh, but quite frankly, if I had been looking at me, I wouldn’t have taken anything I said to be of consequence either.

Just the other day, I was watching bad daytime television (it happens sometimes) when a talk show came on. The show had some kind of resident GP to consult on all things “health” related. He was being interviewed about a new study that had just come out about the effects of cellphones on developing brain cancer. I already told you, it was bad television.  Cancer research itself is complicated. Hypothetical cancer research on the long term effects of cellphone usage when there is no good data set or correlates is, well, absurd at best. Yet, the show’s GP made some staggering conclusions about radiation and the sterility your phone is BBMing to your testicles in your pocket.

For the record, the most likely way your blackberry will kill you is if you twitter while driving, or if you keep answering it while you’re at dinner with me and I ordered a steak that came with a big knife.

What amazed me (okay it wasn’t amazing, it was expected and a little unfortunate), was how much everybody hung off of the doctor’s words. I’m not putting down GPs, they are great at getting you the phone numbers of specialists who will actually help you. I’m only being a little facetious, that’s precisely what they’re supposed to do! If a GP knew as much about an ailment as the specialist, they’d be the specialist. Just like I wouldn’t ask a 300 pound person (even if they were a doctor) about weight loss or my genetics professor about Greek philosophy.

If it had been someone with a PhD in chemistry who told my father about stereoisomers, he probably wouldn’t have said “no”. To him, I was about as reliable as Wikipedia; a vessel of mindless regurgitation of popular dogma.

So check your sources. Follow the funding, motivations, and platforms of the people you’re relying on for information. Information goes down better with a few grains of salt. Just because it’s in print, in a journal (there are “academic” journals about clairvoyance), or narrated by Morgan Freeman doesn’t make it infallible, no matter how soothing the baritone may be.

Quorn is a commercially available meat substitute (move over Tofu) that is made from proteins extracted from…single celled fungi! We’re not talking about grinding up some mushroom caps, this is the kind of fungus (if you want to get specific, it’s a mould) that grows on the peaches you forgot about before you went on vacation. The kind that grow spores. Fuzzy spores. When you grow it in a lab, it kind of looks wet. Hungry yet?

It’s not really as infectious as it sounds. Many fungal cells are especially high in protein. In some cases 40-80% of the cell is protein. So how do you go from fuzzy mould to grocery store? The protein is extracted from the fungus after it is grown in vats (shouldn’t more things be made in vats? I just like the word “vats”). The protein is then bound together with egg whites and flavoured. Unfortunately Quorn isn’t “vegan”, which is too bad because vegans are the ones who would probably get a fetish kick out of eating fungal proteins. Anyways – a little salt and voila – something sorta like tofu.

Have I convinced you yet?

That's not the only surprising thing...

How about this?

A 500kg cow will produce 0.5 kg of biomass in 24 hours. 500kg of some fungi will produce 50,000 kg of biomass in 24 hours.

I think the best (only) valid argument for not eating as much meat is the energy argument; it just takes so much resource to turn grains into chickens, which can be ground up and fed to cows, to make a juicy t-bone. Luckily, the t-bone makes an irresistibly tasty counter-argument, so I can chew on my medium rare hypocrisy not feel so bad about it.

That said, I do like be adventurous with my food, and I’ll try anything once (twice with enough peer-pressure), so I’ll take a microbial adventure next time I head down to the States (Quorn still isn’t available in Canada). I’m sure I can pick some up passing through Nebraska.

Side note: is it just me or does an ipad sound like Apple is breaking the high tech feminine hygiene product market. One of the apps could generate excuses not to have sex.

Aren’t stereotypes fun?

Anyways, back to the point. Social taboos are often broken by laughter. Great comedians like Mel Brooks, the Monty Python crew, Eddie Murphy and Joan Rivers have taken religion, race, and sexuality and pointed out that everyone has one, does it, and it ain’t pretty. Nobody’s safe from a sharp tongue, and comedy can bring everyone to the same level than better than preaching ignorance to people’s differences. Pretending that Asians aren’t bad drivers, fat people don’t jiggle, and that sex always comes with Barry White and no clean-up is covering up the ugly (and hilarious) truth.

Having a laugh about something is often the best way to accept it, and you’re best off ready to have a laugh at your own expense. Sort of like being teased by your big brother, the only way to let an issue go is to become desensitized to it. Don’t take it so personally, everyone has a race, overbearing mother, and annoying habit. People are going to laugh at you anyways, you might as well laugh with them.

So what about remaining taboos? Weight was one of the later ones to go, which is probably because the donuts and popping buttons come with a side of heart disease and increased risk of cancer, which are really hard to make funny. Still, the scale tipped in the favor of fat (can be) funny. There’s just too much material there to work with.

One of the last taboos out there is economics. Income. There are a lot of reasons that talking about money is taboo. A lot of people have suffered immensely at the hands of economic disparity, wars have been fought over class systems and credit cards have ruined more marriages than prostitutes and office assistants…combined! However, people have suffered and marriages have been ruined by fat, race, and sex (or lack thereof) too.

One of the contributing factors is that poverty isn’t really all that funny. The catch? Not talking about economic disparity can increase it. Not talking about banks, interest, markets, and cold hard cash decreases how well people understand it, to the point where the average American family has less than no money. Not just none, less! That barely seems possible.

So is the answer to make fun of poor people? No, at least I don’t think so, though it might be worth a college try. Ironic, considering college is just one little day (graduation) away from unemployment. To get a head start, most upper year undergrads and grad students give up shaving (I wish I was just talking about the males) and don corduroys with holes in the crotch. They’ll look great at their next interview under the expressway. They’ll get real familiar with the classifieds, and windshields.

I graduate in December.

If a child has a high probability of having a happy life, is that a reason to have a child?
Consequently, if a child has a high probability of being unhappy, is that a reason not to have a child?
 
It seems as though it is easy to make a list of why not to have a child. Financial instability, lack of a suitable support network or relationship, age, physical inability, living situation, or even political or social arrangements. The fact that most universities (at least here in Canada) give out birth control like candy tells me that lots of people have lots of reasons for not wanting to have children.
 
On the other hand, fertility technology is a multi billion dollar industry, and the population has been on the rise for centuries, so there must be reasons to have the little buggers as well. (Note: This makes the assumption that people act reasonably, which is a bigger stretch than one would want to believe).
 
Maybe my perspective will change, but it seems as though a lot of what influences people to have children is not necessarily a checkmark in the “pros” column, but a lack of checkmarks in the “cons” column. If you’re in a stable relationship, can afford it, live in a place that has the space for a child, are fertile… it’s sort of the “thing to do”.
 
Advocates against child rearing among the drug addicted, young teens, and war torn might argue that because these specific children will have an “unhappy life”, they are better off not born. There are at the very least seven problems with such a statement, but only the first is needed to negate the Shopenhauer viewpoint.
 
You can’t compare anything to the unknown; non-existence is an unknown, and therefore you cannot say that to be alive, even miserably is to harm someone. Subsequently, you cannot say that to leave someone “unborn” is not to harm them. That’s the trick, you just don’t know!
 
This is a well known philosophical thought experiment called the “non-existence” problem. It poses particular trouble for schools of thought that employ a countable measure of pleasure or wellbeing; specifically, utilitarianism. You can’t base a measure of good or bad against a complete unknown. Of course, nothing is known for certain, but schools of thought such as deontology or virtue ethics employ statistical predictibility; what is likely to happen. When it comes to non-existence, one can’t even say what might be likely.
 
So even if Shopenhauer is right, and life is miserable and all kids will have a miserable life, it is not a reason to not have them! Non-existence might be much much worse. We just don’t know. Thus, it is not the child’s life that might be improved or hindered by their existence or non-existence – it is our own.
 
Back to the reasons not to bear children; like financial or social instability – it is the parent whose life will be harmed by the existence of the child – it is whether the parent will be helped or hindered by the child that is the reason to have children.
 
Of course, there are many unreasonable rationalizations for having children as well, but if we concerned ourselves with them, we’d be here a long time.
 
So in conclusion, I think Shopenhauer is not only a bit of a downer, but ignores a very problematic flaw in his argument. As much as altruism is a peachy idea, I think we’re in it for number one.  We’re not having kids because we think we can give the kid a good life, we’re doing it because somehow it’ll improve our own life.

"I'm sorry Mr. Aristotle, syllogisms will do you no good with me"

Akrasia is the psychological phenomenon in which one knows and understands that there is “right” course of action available to him, but yet he still does what he knows to be wrong.

In colloquial terms, we would call akrasia “weakness of will”.

Those who lack willpower are not simply mistaken about their course of action. For instance, it is very unlikely that children are akratic, as they often “don’t know better”. The akratic person, however, fully understands that what he is doing is wrong.

For example, you have an exam in two days, and you know that you want to do well on the exam, and that in order to do well you have to study. The next thing you know, you’ve watched an entire season of House. It happens to all of us.

So what causes akrasia?

Greek Classics (Aristotle, most specifically) described all people as having different kinds of desires or appetites. These are sometimes innate and irrational, while others can be induced and rational. Some examples are hunger, sexual appetite and even an appetite for reason. The last means that we desire explanations for the phenomena around us. Nobody sees a floating cow and doesn’t ask “why is that cow floating?” We hope.

The akratic, according to Aristotle, places his appetites in front of his reason. Let me give a clearer example. One person can eat one slice of cake or four. In the case of an akratic, while he KNOWS that he should only eat one slice, he says;

“I am hungry enough to eat four slices”

Where the appetite is “hunger” and the reason is “enough”.

A reasonable person (not crazy) would say;

“One slice is enough to satisfy my hunger”

In this case the reason “enough” precedes the appetite “hunger”.

The difference between these two statements is subtle but paramount. We can only “know” things with the reasonable part of our persons, not our appetitive. In order to keep from going crazy, Aristotle would say that we have to let our appetites follow our reason. Rather than be dictated by our desires, we allow a reasonable amount of desire.

So much for “follow your heart”, “do what you feel is right” and all that. It sounds less romantic, but aren’t the romantics always the ones that end up miserable enough to write or paint about it?