I Totally Need To Just Take It Easy, Man.

My mom and I were talking sometime before her surgery, and she mentioned something that involved praying or prayer in the conversation.  She then remembered, oh yeah, I don't believe in that stuff anymore. This usually triggers a conversation about religion.  What happened next was brief, but extremely enlightening. 

I remember expressing that I felt pity for her because she wasn't able to think outside the box.  In other words, I perceived her way of thinking as closed.  The parameters are set; they do not change.  She gave me the same confused look I was about to give her when she expressed her pity for me for not being able to find any sort of peace.  She was referring to never finding answers, continuously finding contradictions within the parameters she and others have set, and always on a quest for truth.  A light turned on right above my head, just like in the cartoons.  I said nothing further on the subject and we moved on.

A revelation came shortly after showing confusion myself, and thinking about why she was also taken aback.  We both find peace and contentment in completely different places. What makes it difficult to accept for the both of us is that these places seem like hell holes for the other.  

The reason I have been militant and angry with this subject, is that I once thought inside the box. I know, because I've lived it, that it is possible to break down the barriers of that box and think freely and there is peace in it. So, because I changed, I think other people will change too. 

Truth is, however, I need to lighten the fuck up.  Hopefully, you have been witnessing those efforts for a while now.  

Embracing my Introversion

It was well before I ran across the Huffington Post article 23 Signs You're Secretly An Introvert that I recognized the fact and embraced it. Of course I have weaknesses and deficiencies; everyone does. However, I labeled some of my behaviors and idiosyncrasies incorrectly as such. It took a while for me to recognize that this is just the way I do things, and that there isn't anything wrong with that. I began to embrace my introversion.  

Remember when texting took off? Were you someone who hated it? Maybe you still hate it.  I remember not getting it at first, and then slowly understanding its charm. Now I can hardly do anything else and I don't care. Introverts are better communicators through writing. We like writing. I like it so much I have a blog. 

My wife lives in another state. People often wonder how I'm coping with that. Even though I'm living alone most the week, there is never a dull moment. I am NEVER bored. There is a continuous monologue going on in my head. So much so, that I can't listen to audio books. Unlike reading the book for real, you can't just skim backwards or flip back a page to the point where your inner dialogue took off. Where was I? Oh yeah, my wife in another state. Sorry, I got distracted. 

Yes, so I miss my wife. We talk almost every day to catch up on the day's activities. If you have a domestic partner who comes home every night, imagine if you had to set 20-40 minutes aside and engage in conversation with each other, devoting your attention to them for that entire time. Hmmm.

Yeah, we're missing the physical presence, but I bet we're engaging in conversation with each other more than most of you. Weird how that works. So, if you're wondering, we're doing fine.  

My biggest challenge I've been working on lately is finding comfort in long silences and squashing the ingrained idea that they are awkward. Sure, they may be awkward for other people, but they don't have to be for you. I'm slowly getting more and more comfortable in the company of others by realizing that I don't have to talk. They'll do all the talking if I let them wallow in their own discomfort of quiet. If they're like me, we'll be fine with a quiet moment. I'm not all the way there yet, but it is coming. And it is glorious. 

My Day Shift

As I neared completion of Hugh Howey's Wool, I ordered the other two books in the series, which are Shift and Dust.  I had no regrets.  Although Wool was fantastic and left me satisfied as a story by itself, I was thirsty to find out what these other books in this world were all about.  So, I started my day shift reading Shift.  This review assumes you have already read Wool.

Sorry, the book was shifting during exposure

The Shift omnibus is composed of three parts.  Each of the three parts have two stories.  The first and second parts are prequels to the story of Wool, providing some insight into how and why the silos came about.  The third part is a parallel story of Wool in a sense.  One story begins around the same time as the other story ends, which is when Juliette makes it over the hill and meets Jimmy (Solo) in Silo 17.

Once again, I find multiple meanings for the simple title of his book. Very soon into chapter 2, the reader is introduced to the world of Silo #1 and the cryogenic thawing and freezing of individuals who are just coming on or getting off their shift.  The theme of the entire book is the shift between order and chaos, and the different events that occur that determine the direction of that shift. We also have the shifting the reader must go through, from one story and time to another. 

The odd chapters in 'First Shift: Legacy' introduce the reader to congressman Donald Greene in the years 2049-2052.  His story, one could argue, is one of a shift from order to chaos.  He is recruited by Senator Thurman to begin work on a private project.  Over the course of the three years, he slowly puts pieces together that the reader may even have difficulty doing.  You can see Donald's internal struggle of having to choose between two great evils.  But it isn't just that. There is a path that he is already on, which may or may not be a greater evil. The idea put forth, however, is one in which you would have to selectively get off of that path in pursuit of another evil.  Humans are faced with these choices from time to time.  In cases like these, it is easy to do nothing when the outcome is not going to be pleasant in either case.   

The even chapters follow Troy, who is serving a shift as some sort of 2nd or 3rd level officer of Silo #1.  We meet him in chapter 2 as he is waking up in 2110 out of a cryogenic sleep, the world long since destroyed.  Troy's story is one of a shift from having forgotten to one of remembering.  His story is an example of why I prefer a good read over a movie or a TV show any day. Howey ties together the two stories of Donald and Troy in a clever way only a novel can do.

In Second Shift: Order, Howey provides the reader with a slightly less jarring shift of going back and forth from chapter to chapter; this time spending 3-5 chapters with one story and time line before switching to another.  In this book, we meet Mission from Silo #18, back before the great uprising.  Although a great story, I will admit that I couldn't find the connection between this and anything in the Wool series.  Perhaps I will find out when reading Dust.  I have some guesses as to who The Crow may be, but am not sure.  I invite fans to give their own thoughts below (as long as it isn't a spoiler; I haven't read Dust yet).

The Second Shift also continues to follow Donald, a freezing and thawing time gap from the First Shift.  The reader begins to get a huge wave of answers about the shit that went down.  I can't say much about this part of the story without giving much away, but Donald plays a large part in investigating a suicide.  Throughout Donald's story in the Second Shift, I saw him shift from one side of sanity to the other.  A great quote from this story:

"Humans have this disease, Donny, this compulsion to move until we bump into something.  And then we tunnel through that something, or we sail over the edge of the oceans, or we stagger across mountains--
Fear.  Even the fear of death is barely enough to counter this compulsion of ours."  

After thinking about this quote a while, I don't find it accurate; it is too general.  Many humans do not have this disease.  Many humans are content in waking up and going through the same routine as the day before.  These humans are not only resistant to the idea of 'tunneling' through this routine to something else, they are fearful and anxious of other humans, like myself, tunneling through.  In fact, they may take measures to stop us from doing so.

Missing from these two stories in the Second Shift, was their convergence.  Here again, I could be just missing something.

In Third Shift: The Pact, Howey again moves in groups of 3-5 chapters from one story to the next.  It would be too much to offer what character plays in one of the stories.  I want you to experience the similar surprise that I did, so no spoilers here.  The time and setting is very shortly after Juliette disappears over the hill in Wool, and takes place inside Silo #1.

The other, as I've mentioned before, is the story of Jimmy (Solo) from Silo #17.  It begins when he is 16 years old and an uprising begins.  We find out that Jimmy is the son of the most important IT guy; the guy with the secret room.  Told completely from his perspective, we gain no insight into what makes this uprising occur.  The only thing that we know is that a cleaning is to occur the following day (which doesn't happen).  We jump quickly through his story of being alone (or is he?) by way of these series of chapters: Hour 1, Day 1, Week 1, and then Years 2, 7, 12, 16, 20, and finally, 34.

At the end of the sequence of chapters for Year 16, Solo has been with a cat for several years now.  He would go down to the flooded part of the silo to catch fish for Shadow.  But he didn't want to catch the last one. He wanted to leave the last one be, projecting himself on this last fish.

Just the one he thought, as he watched Shadow eat.  It would be scared enough down there.  No need to go yanking it out into the frightful air.  Just let the poor thing be. 

My day shift is over.  Time to shift to another book.  On to Dust, where everything must return at some point. 

Thanksgiving. And a review of Inception (the movie).

I have a shitload of grading to do.  There were two stacks of homework and two stacks of exams on my plate to trudge through during my break.  Last weekend, I planned on grading one stack for each weekday through the break giving myself one extra day just in case.  It is now Friday and I'm only through two stacks.  Funny how things like that work out.

Besides reading Wool (which I review here), Erin and I had some much needed time together.  She is working in Perry, KS now as the director of the Highland Community College Perry Center campus.  That is a good distance away.  Enough so, that a commute home every night is not reasonable. 

What a blow-off looks like

So far, we've managed very well.  We keep quite busy during the week so that we can enjoy the weekends together.  There is no long term plan in place yet.  The short term plan is to continue doing what we're doing.  If two years go by and we're still doing what we're doing, we may start considering other options.  For now, we're doing fine. 

Erin brewed her a Mosaic IPA on Wednesday before Thanksgiving.  This was her first home brewed beer in a LONG time.  With some coaching and help from her seasoned brewing husband, she created an amazing batch of wort that has great potential.  In fact, in a 6.5 gallon fermenter, it started blowing off on Thanksgiving morning.  That means the yeast were so active they ride the carbon dioxide they create all the way through the airlock making a mess if you aren't set up for it.  

Erin enjoys cooking like I enjoy brewing.  So, she busied herself with cooking on Thanksgiving, while I graded, did laundry, enjoyed her cooking, and drank many different concoctions.  

For breakfast, she cooked us some open faced sandwiches.  She first spread pesto and Parmesan on bread and broiled it, before topping it with a tomato, and some fried mushrooms and eggs.  She then made some POMimosas, using Prosecco and POM (pomegranate juice) rather than orange juice.   

For lunch, we ate some kale pesto rotini pasta topped with Paremesan with a side salad.  The pesto was actually leftovers from the previous day. 

And then for our non-traditional Thanksgiving dinner we had some turkey breast tenderloins braised with rosemary, sage, and thyme, basted in white wine and roasted in the oven to perfection.  There were some steamed veggies on the side along with some roasted fingerling potatoes and garlic.  

To give you an idea of how much Erin has been cooking all week, here is a picture of the fermentation fridge.  We can use the fermentation fridge as a regular fridge during the winter months, since I need the heat pad to maintain my fermentation temperatures between 64-68 F.  The fridge is needed in summer months and for lagering year round.  I'm just not doing any lagering right now. This is a good thing since we need the space for all our bottles and food right now. 

Decided on the spur of the moment, we chose to re-watch Christopher Nolan's Inception on Thanksgiving evening.  This is one of my favorite films, and definitely my favorite by him.  I love the open ended ending.  The viewer has to make up their own mind on what is the dream and what is reality.  And after several viewings, I'm fairly certain that he made the movie so that one could have arguments for either and that there isn't a true answer.  Very much like Frank Stockton's The lady, or the tiger? 

The scene where I believe he lets it be open ended is when Yusuf (the chemical expert) takes them downstairs to see several people together dreaming as one.  Cobb (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) asks to get plugged in.  We see some quick dreams of his late wife, and then he wakes all frazzled, unplugs and runs into the bathroom to splash water on his face.  He pulls out his totem to make sure he's not dreaming. This is a top:  

Cobb knows that if the top stops spinning, then he is back in reality.  If it continues indefinitely, he knows he is dreaming.  If it were me, I would just have to do some long jumps.  If I jumped and somehow floated along the air for a ridiculously long distance, I would know I was dreaming.  If I plummeted back to the earth well under 8 feet, then I would know I was in reality.  

Anyhow, Cobb is interrupted in this scene before he can let the top settle.  He knocks it off the sink and picks it up off the floor.  For the rest of the movie, we can now make an argument that he is one level down in a dream world. But we can also make a fine case that he is in reality.  Which did you choose?  

The Wool Over My Eyes

The Wool Over My Eyes

I just finished reading Hugh Howey's Wool.  This is the first book of three in the Silo Saga.  It was a fantastic read that I recommend.

The world of the silo that Howey creates pulls you in immediately.  The setting is a distant future, in which the outside air is extremely toxic and deadly forcing people to live in an underground silo.  The story is set far enough in the future that all the people in the silo are several generations in.

As you meet characters and get used to the Order (the rules you must follow in the silo), you begin to realize that these people only know the silo and the barren wasteland of toxic air outside as the only thing existing in the world. It is challenging to try and get in that mindset.

Howey's writing is very clever.  At the end of Chapter 1, for example, he ends with a character's exclamation, "Tell her I want to go outside."  I remember thinking at the time how that didn't seem to be much of a cliffhanger.  In the following chapters, we find out how these people have to follow strict rules, never ask questions, and never express ideas or any interest whatsoever in exploring outside.  These can all lead to one's exile and certain death.

By pages 33 and 34, you begin to see the theme and understand the meaning behind the title, which has to do with pulling the wool over one's eyes.  On these pages, one of the characters is doing something referred to as 'cleaning'.

"The cleaning!
Holston reached down and pulled a wool pad from his chest. The cleaning! He knew, in a dizzying rush, a torrent of awareness, why, why. Why!"
...
"His wife had been right: the view from inside was a lie."

What is really fun about the book, is at this point, you have no clear idea of whose eyes the wool has been pulled over.  Is it those inside the silo?  Holston's eyes?  The reader's eyes?  A combination or subset of these?  This was my hook.  I couldn't stop.  

Unlike other apocalyptic type stories in which you no longer have things that you know once existed, it explores a world in which you live with several limitations, and are unaware of the multitude of possibilities, and in fact hindered from stumbling upon such possibilities.

Even though I, as the reader, sided with those seeking truth and exposing falsehoods, I noticed the conflict in choosing this side.  For things to run smoothly, does everyone need to know the entire truth?

Here we have a character's thoughts late in the novel: "So much about her previous life made sense." "It turned out that some crooked things looked even worse when straightened. Some tangled knots only made sense once unraveled."

What "she" is suggesting here, is that she somewhat understood why certain rules and why certain veils were in place, even though "she" was completely and totally on the side of squashing such rules and unveiling the secrets.

 Isn't it best if the wool is pulled over several eyes in some cases?  But then, who decides those cases?  This is what the book will probe you into thinking about, which is what I love. Trust me when I say, the book was very engrossing.  It kept me up a little at night and definitely affected a dream or two.

------------------------------

I'll finish with a few lines I really loved as an academic, but are nowhere near central to the story.  These words are thoughts of Walker, who is tinkering with a walkee talkee that only has one channel.

"Walker was the one who had taught Scottie that it's always okay to admit when you don't know something. If you couldn't do this, you would never truly know anything."

The Ultimate Hypothesis Test Evolution is Fighting Against

What is a hypothesis test? You don't need statistical knowledge to understand the idea of hypothesis testing. In hypothesis testing, there are two hypotheses. To illustrate, we will look at a courtroom. There is a plaintiff and a defendant. The defendant is assumed innocent until proven guilty. The plaintiff is known as the claimant or complaintant, who makes a claim against this innocence.

The two hypotheses in hypothesis testing are the null and alternative hypothesis. How do you tell which is which? The null is the one that is assumed true throughout the entire test. In this example, it is that the defendant is innocent. The alternative hypothesis is the one for which the claimant would like to pursue evidence. Here, it is that the defendant is guilty.  

Each individual juror has their own alpha level. What is an alpha level? As long as you are completely unbiased, and believe the defendant to be innocent before the trial begins, your alpha level would be the point at which enough evidence has stacked up for you to reject this belief.  

Here is the counter-intuitive part. When evidence for the alternative keeps stacking up, the probability that your original assumption (the null hypothesis) still holds becomes smaller and smaller. Once that probability falls below your alpha level, you reject the assumption in favor of the alternative. This probability is what statisticians refer to as a p-value. So, a very small p-value is synonymous with a large amount of evidence against the original assumption. This is the most difficult concept for an undergraduate statistics student to comprehend.  

This is how science works. We observe things happening in nature. Then we try and explain them and make a hypothesis against some status quo. Then we make more observations. The evidence then continues to build or it doesn't.  

This is what has happened with evolution. The evidence has stacked up in such a tremendous fashion, that one would have to have an extremely low alpha level to not accept it. And that is just it. We have a culture that has set the Ultimate Hypothesis Test into the minds of most Americans at a young age. This Ultimate Hypothesis test is as follows. 

Null Hypothesis: God created man

Alternative Hypothesis: Man has come about naturally through evolution

Alpha level: 

.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001

That is, 1 x 10^(-99). I just typed it out for emphasis.  

So, even though these Americans have been confronted by VAST amounts of evidence (so much in fact, that even the theory of gravity doesn't have near as much), it still isn't enough to make the probability that God created man smaller than the alpha I gave you. Maybe it is just 1 x 10^(-69). Not enough. Null hypothesis maintained.  

This is what we are competing against. It is a combination of stubbornness to the 99th degree and an incomprehensible amount of ignorance.  

This is the world we live in. 

Well, at least there are mind altering drugs to which we can turn. 

Contraposition, Syllogism, and The Holy Bible

The law of contraposition is that a conditional statement is equivalent to the contrapositive of that statement.  Whoa!  Those are a lot of big words.  Let's give you an example to help out with that.

Let's say you accept the statement "If you are a boy, then you are made of snips and snails" as true. The law of contraposition states that you must also accept the statement "If you are not made of snips and snails, then you are not a boy" as true.  

More formally, one says that if A implies B, then 'not B' implies 'not A'.  You can visualize this using the following diagram.  If you are inside A, then you are definitely inside B.  If you are outside B, then you are definitely in the shaded region representing 'outside A'.  

The transitive property of statements is known as syllogism in the logic world.  If you have two or more implications that are true, you can come to conclusions using deductive reasoning.  Let's add to our example above to get an idea.  

Now, let's suppose that we accept the statement "If you are made of snips and snails, then you are absolutely disgusting" as true.  Then, using deductive reasoning, we must also accept the statement "If you are a boy, then you are absolutely disgusting" as true.  

Again, more formally, if you accept that A implies B and you accept that B implies C, then you must also accept that A implies C.  This can be visualized by the graph below.  If you are in A, then you are definitely in B.  If you are in B then you are definitely in C.  Thus, if you are in A, then you are definitely in C. 

Now, let's have some fun with a few of my favorite versus in the Bible and use the law of contraposition and some syllogism.  First, let's have a look at Luke 14:26.  This is the spoken word of Jesus.

"If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters--
yes, even their own life--such a person cannot be my disciple."

I'm going to choose brother here to make things simple.  From Luke 14:26 we get the statement "If you do not hate your brother, you cannot be a disciple of Jesus." Using the law of contraposition, we find that "If you are a disciple of Jesus, then you hate your brother."  Hang on, the fun is just beginning. 

To illustrate some syllogism, we're going to now look at one of my other favorite verses in the New Testament: 1 John 3:15.  

"Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him." 

Now let's get all of our statements in a row and use some syllogism. 

1. "If you are a disciple of Jesus, then you hate your brother."
2. "If you hate your brother, you are a muderer."
3. "If you are a murderer, you have no eternal life residing in you.

This deductive reasoning could get tough since we have to use one more level of syllogism than previously illustrated.  Think of a larger set D that encompasses all of C.  So, if A implies B, B implies C, and C implies D, then A implies D.  

Aha! I think we have something here.  Given the statements above, we have "If you are a disciple of Jesus, you have no eternal life residing in you."  

THE WORD OF GOD! Can I hear an "AMEN"?  Maybe a "RAMEN"?  

The fact that some of you want to immediately go to the Bible and try and put this into some sort of context so that you can refute this is ironic to me.  I don't even believe this statement, so you don't have to convince me.  In order to believe the statement at all, one would have to put some kind of weight to the Bible.  Because one can take two verses from the Bible and come up with such a statement, I don't place any weight in the Bible.  I'm still trying to figure out why most of you do.