Breaking away...

Unable to deal with one more weak posting about Darwin or snippy offense-taking at nothing, I've stopped posting to the list where all met, and I resigned as PR Officer a month or two ago. I'll be trotting out my opinions here, I reckon. It's just not worth it to spend my mental energy with really crabby, self-important people.

So! Someone asked me about randomness the other day, and I realized I'm not sure if I still believe in it. To me, true randomness is artificial, has to be computer-generated or something. I think true randomness in natural systems is impossible because they're always being influenced by other forces, other things. Thoughts?

Sod's Law =?

The dry humoured thought occurred to me yesterday "it's obvious when you know - though it's not obvious why you didn't know in the first place". Now is that a paradox or a conundrum? I guess it's obvious when you know..

And following on from that, why is it that as someone once said to me "you have to make your own luck" when so-called 'bad luck' makes itself thanks to sod's law?! - which by a stroke of irony even has it's own mathematical representation these days as ((U+C+I) x (10-S))/20 x A x 1/(1-sin(F/10)).

Yep

Just back onto posting to Chaos Nation - thanks; don't have a heck of a lot to say accept that it is possible to integrate chaos/complexity into personal activity, but this may make one appear a little strange. Dry humour ey, can't beat it! But seriously folks it's a theme I'm really interested in exploring/exploiting if only so I can get the job I want right now, for example.

The press kits are away... repeat: the press kits are away

So I've spent the last few days on the phone with lots of local media outlets trying to get them to take a look at our press kit and possibly cover the conference (don't worry, I warmed 'em up with a flyer mailing a while back). The best thing I could come up with to get people to take a look, or take a listen to my pitch was: "This is not your father's scientific conference." We'll see how it flies. I've sent out about half of our first run, and more responses and requests may trickle in.

So much of getting your kit looked at seems to have to do with who you get on the phone. I got a nice lady at a Boulder radio station who's going to hand-carry our kit to the news director. Most of the TV stations didn't even give me a name--they just wanted me to send the kit to the assignment desk. One friendly guy at an assignment desk said I could send it to him. That was nice. I have no sense, though, of what percentage of these are going to get looked at, or loved, or anything.

When I was a newspaper editor, I used to get press kits all the time, mostly for movies, because I was the A & E section editor. They usually sent good glossy pictures (some of which we used in reviews), free tickets, and occasionally schwag, which was cool. I still have some of that schwag. If I had review space, I got a stringer, put the tickets in her hot little hand, gave her a deadline and sent her to the movies. If I didn't, I didn't. I know what I liked: the basic information somewhere obvious, contact information in case I needed to get a hold of them (our kit has contact information on EVERY DAMN PAGE), graphics I could use, and maybe some tidbit of interesting information. A good press release is one you can pretty much lift out of the kit and print as is. I tried to write one like that.

This is a different ball of wax, though. A press kit for a movie is not a whole lot like a press kit for an academic conference and organization. It's still slim enough to go under a door, and I've got things in there like "fun facts" and pictures of Denver from space. Keep your fingers crossed--I've done what I can!

Thepresskitthepresskitthepresskit...

It's almost done. Just about everything that's going to go in it for now is together. I plan to start copying it and subsequently distributing it over the weekend and into next week. In the meantime, I'm trying to be cute (but not too cute!) with some of the components. For example, typically, organizational press kits contain stuff like FAQ sheets and testimonials, sometimes tip sheets/fun facts, etc. Well, the SCTPLS isn't a typical organization in many respects, so I'm doing my best to get those components to look like the ones from typical organizations wit our own wacky content. But not too wacky. Reporters hate that.

Punking Darwin

In response to Keith Warren on the CHAOPSYC list server, I wanted to take a beat here to address his question to me and clarify some aspects of intelligent design that get lost in the theater of Darwinism vs. Creationism.

Keith says: The goal in science is to demonstrate a natural mechanism that will explain a given phenomenon. Positing a supernatural mechanism is just a punt. So, again, what's your theory? Why is it better than Darwinian selection? Where is the evidence, preferably peer-reviewed? Build a better theory and the world will beat a path to your door. But ID doesn't have a theory at all.

Walter ReMine's book - The Biotic Message develops the design side of it on several levels, one of which is the presupposition of science needing to find natural mechanisms for phenomenon. I'm not sure what spooks people from ID more - the subject aspect of the effects of intelligence on life processes or the implications of the concept of design. Anyway, you wanted my big theory, so I'll boil it down to the only life that contains both sides of the argument - my own. My peer-reviewed papers, albeit not by NDPLS :(, are posted here and here. You'll find plenty of familiar friends in the references so I'm sure those 6 year old papers will be enough.

Science -- and I'm being conventional here - places the notion of falsifiability in the face of all 'pretenders' to the throne. The problem -- and I'm being unconventional here - is that Occam's Razor cuts both directions...

Darwin, who's work goes far beyond natural selection btw, did for biology what the periodic table of elements did for chemistry. In a nutshell, it gave us a map. What Gavin (I hope that's you?) was trying to get across in his posts was the notion that there's a presupposition Darwin has the best map around re: evolution. The LOL part for me is that hard core science types shudder when Darwin's model is framed a just another theory. The open-ended nature of scientific inquiry is predicated on the willingness of the scientist to dismiss their old take on things when a more lucid, 'observable' (OK, physicists get around this one), and most of all useful fiction comes along to improve the narrative modern science began 500 years ago. Science - and I'm being conventional again - collectively bristles when they get lumped in with other disciplines that are more at home with their storytelling, time-binding nature. It's only now, in the post-metaphysical Integral Age, that we have the resources to 'unpack' the jewel from the molasses and get into that dirty topic of subjectivity.

Once science gets fluent in discussing the dynamics of imagination and presupposition from a 1st person perspective, both individually and culturally, it will be able to put their more 3rd person-based skills of observation and expectation into their appropriate framework. Until then, Darwin gets to mind his map...

And we get to punk his dead ass, MRF 06.23

Inertia - The Beauty of Chaotic Indifference

Yesterday was an off day. Yet, for some reason, everything got done that had to get done. The perpetual list of lingering projects, preparations for the summer, and the George Foreman BBQ (btw, Bubba Burgers, yum) were all traversed. The the often underrated emotional tonifying benefits of 'sacking out' were enjoyed.

So, in the end, what's so unexceptable about inertia? I think it's a valuable thing to possess, even cherish. Face it, the world loves to bully us around. All we can do is delay change, we can't deny it. Inertia at least gives us a place to stop the ferris wheel and look around a little. Of course, it's a question of proportion. Too much interia and we become inert. That's no fun. Too little inertia and we're the unabomber with no 'order parameter' to reign ourselves in...

Nonlinear dyamics avoids the subject of inertia, often copping out by using those wonderful psychobabble labels, resistance, boundary conditons and my personal favorite - borderline personality. NDS loves motion, change, flux, etc..Inertia?
What's that? What's ironic is that neutrinos (which still sounds like the name of a breakfast cereal) may be a basic building block of the universe. Maybe the key to like is to find the inertia in us and use it to re-charge our 'batteries' for the next wave of self-organization. Maybe there's a reason for pressing pause...

Driving under a yellow flag, MRF 05.31