The straight line

The changing geopolitical situation and certain intellectual discoveries I’ve made have led me to think about future violence in the world in general and in my vicinity in particular. I believe that a violent future is likely – that is new, I used to think that people in the rich west had little to worry about and that the Finnish army in particular was more futile than dangerous. What hasn’t changed is that I don’t want to be a soldier in any army.

But that doesn’t mean that I reject the possibility of moral violence, even on my own part. In fact, I can imagine wanting to fight not only for my life or those I immediately care about, but for the society I live in or indeed for another one that urgently requires and deserves protection. Alas, it is notoriously difficult to know that participation in the hell of any war is going towards any sort of good. In almost every situation, a person’s best bet is to do no harm first of all, and to be peacefully productive second of all. Even training and preparing for violence can cause violence by constituting a threat to others.

On the balance I do regret that when the chips are down, as a defender of my own society I am practically useless. If it were overrun I might want to try to protect it, but without preparation I wouldn’t be very effective. It’s a tragedy that armies consist of human robots who are bound by oath to obey (any) orders. I can’t morally allow a government to decide whether or not I should kill another person, and this is really the one big reason I didn’t go into Finnish military service. This would be true regardless of its past, but it’s nevertheless important to note that the last time the Finnish army fought it invaded foreign territory – alongside the Nazi army, no less. It also shot Finnish pacifists.

The only good army would be an army of the people, not of the nation – one that trains together but fights by individual conscience. A volunteer army is what I would call it, although those in power tend to use rather different words.

David Miliband says Russia had blasted well better not do what it just did:

“The Russian president says he is not afraid of a new cold war. We don’t want one. He has a big responsibility not to start one.”

An optimistic idea, that other people are morally bound to carry out your political will, and one not likely to succeed. You will know this if you’ve ever been on a playground:

Bully: I shove you in pile of snow now.
Miliband: No, don’t do that. You have a big responsibility not to do that.
*shove*

Compare:

“Stalin says he is not afraid of trouble with the western powers. We don’t want trouble. He has a big responsibility to co-operate with us.”

When you’re in the game of realpolitik, the concept of responsibility is useful only for propaganda. International law is also now a joke, which I always thought was one of the worst things about the Iraq war. If Iraq and (the independence of) Kosovo were special cases, why not Abkhazia and Ossetia? Why exactly do western leaders expect Russia to care about what they say? Most likely they don’t, and everything they’re saying is just for show.

Haha you English are such choke artists, prepare to get raped

Take that back you horrible man

Ooh it’s beaten him!

Right, you’ll pay for that

Shut it, fatso

Look out!

It was a simple leave really

Oof! Right on the toe!

I’m feeling catty today, so not out

WHAT

You have to get it in the right areas Freddie

Zot! Clean bowled!

It’s a fair cop

YAAAAAR

SIKH ATTACK

I’ve been actively wanting / thinking about getting a new bicycle for a couple of months or so, ever since I started using my crappy old bike again. It had been in storage for several years after being vandalised by Joensuu youths. I paid for some repairs on it, bringing it to usable but definitely unsatisfactory status (eg. almost all of the pedalling power has to come from the right leg due to a crank problem).

A couple of months is a long time to think about buying something, but it just doesn’t come easily to me. Here are four emotional approaches to spending money I’ve encountered:

1) Marxist approach – you weigh the utility of the product against the labour (or equivalent) you have to do to pay for it
2) Economics approach – paying for products is an opportunity cost: you weigh the product against the universe of other things you could buy
3) Fear of scarcity approach – spending takes you closer to ruin: the fear of running out of money decreases general spending desire
4) Money doesn’t mean anything, man -approach: if you want something, you buy it – the only reason not to buy something is running out of money, which seems to happen a lot

I’ve got a lot of the first three, each taking turns to prevent me from spending: if I think about buying something for more than 15 seconds I very seldom end up getting it just because the frustration of needing to acquire more money has time to sink in, it’s impossible for me to satisfy myself that a particular bicycle is truly a good choice, and the thought of having no money feels like having a knife at my throat. In short: if it isn’t booze of food, I’m going to have a hard time with it.

I thought it might be easier to decide on a cheapo bike (I found some reasonable bikes for ~200 euros) but it wasn’t. I didn’t really want a cheapo bike, I wanted a good one. I always buy cheap crap, but this was going to be different. I was only going to be able to bring myself to buy something I actually liked. And besides, a good bike lasts longer.

So I ended up with a Nishiki Hybrid 427. Seven derailleur-operated sprockets in the back, disc brakes, aluminium or stainless everything, 42 mm tyres, 22-inch frame, quick-adjust handlebar. Japano-Taiwanese quality all round. The second quality purchase of my life (the first was my camera). I even went to a no-nonsense-serious-cyclists-only bike shop instead of Bike Planet.

I actually bought it yesterday, but the act of paying 762 euros for the bike and various parts made me weak with pain and I had to go to bed early. Today I felt better and took it for a proper ride. After a map consultation I decided to go see Silvola reservoir firstly. I’d repose by the water and read my bicycle maintenance book. Lakes and ponds are nice things to visit. I might start a project of visiting all the named lakes in the map of the Helsinki area phone book.

The old bike, decrepit but stylish. It’s served me well. I like the horizontal top tube.

Beautiful, isn’t it? I don’t particularly like the wide down tube, but it houses the cables rather neatly.

Disc brakes, baby! They make me feel dangerous.

National bicycle route #3 takes me through the rather malapropos named central park (according to sources malapropos is really an adverb too, so I had to use it). By the time I get to the Maunula-Pirkkola area there are exercising machines every 500 metres. These guys really care about optimising their workouts! I stop by a meadowy hillside to take a picture:

Very pretty

I try to record the chirping and buzzing insects all around me but the high-pitched sound doesn’t make it to my camera’s memory card. Soon afterwards I come to a rather tempting path up the hill. Could I ride all the way up?

Sadly, no. My front wheel hits a depression and I lose momentum. The new bike is not particularly light; I’ll have to practice climbing with it. The path goes up quite some way – is this Paloheinä peak? It surely is:

View to the west

The way down is a very steep and sandy path, a good test for the brakes and my ability to use them maximally without locking the wheels:

View to the northeast

I arrive at the reservoir. The embankments are so high I can’t see the water, and I can’t get to the embankments because they’re fenced off! What a pity.

If you live in the Helsinki metropolitan area, you probably drink what lies beyond

Terrorists please do not poison this water supply

After that disappointment I decide to go visit some of my dead ancestors. Bonus question for church buffs: which churchyard are they buried in?

The organ looks like this

…and the altar looks like this

Our gravesite is outrageously better looking than any of the others I looked at. The (planted) floral arrangement is big, but very stylish and suitable – you can’t really fault it for anything. Which is perhaps the ultimate tastelesness in graveyards.

The rest of the biking day was spent getting lost a couple of times: always fun.

I must have told ten people to read Eliezer Yudkowsky’s stuff by now and I keep forgetting to send them links, so this is for all of yez.

Yudkowsky mainly writes on a collaborative blog called Overcoming Bias (motto: “How can we obtain beliefs closer to reality?”). The other articles are ok too, but Yudkowsky is a true visionary and an extremely intelligent guy. I can’t find a list of his complete postings there, but they’re fairly well interlinked so you can just start reading. If you don’t understand something, go on following references to his older posts and you’ll eventually understand what you didn’t before.

He also has a personal site at yudkowsky.net with even older stuff. It has this notice: “Most of my old writing is horrifically obsolete. Essentially you should assume that anything from 2001 or earlier was written by a different person who also happens to be named “Eliezer Yudkowsky”. 2002-2003 is an iffy call.”

I had some Internetless time with a laptop over the previous couple of days. Normally time + computer = wasted time, but on this occasion the non-connectedness prompted me to do some simple text analysis on the complete text of this blog. During the time I have been writing my blog I have used:

12242 different words
32755 different word-pairs
37428 different word-triples
35174 different word-quadruples
32160 different word-quintuples
29231 different word-sextuples
26492 different word-septuples
23967 different word-octuples
21646 different word-nonuples
19522 different word-decuples
17528 different word-undecuples

Word-tuples only count inside sentence boundaries. So this paragraph contains the pair “only count” but not “boundaries so” (or didn’t until I wrote it just now). The distribution probably follows some Zipf-type law I don’t know about. It looks like this:

Some of my (apparently) favourite tuples (frequency in parentheses):

words: about (181), like (158), people (158), my (148), me (121), things (109), think (95), something (75) (top-3: the (1466), to (957), of (754))

pairs: I don’t (44), I think (43), kind of (31), people who (25), have to (21), en ole (19) (top-3: in the (117), to be (113), of the (106)) honourable mention: child porn (18)

triples: I don’t know (13), I want to (10), it would be (9), in the future (8), I’m going to (7), ei ole mitään (6), don’t want to (6)

quadruples: whether I want to (5), profits as a percentage (4), it’s okay to be (3), I don’t know why (3), going to have to (3), I think this is (3), how I love you (3), this sort of thing (3), a friend of mine (3)

I should design a way to generate poetry out of this stuff.

I’m gonna start a business because my (not numerous) clients don’t like paying one-off salaries to random people like me. They signal as much by 1) saying so 2) dragging their feet with the part where they give me money. Admittedly it is a bit annoying to be constantly sending the single original copy of my tax card to everyone I’ve done some piffling job for. Actually, the main reason I hadn’t registered a business before is the 65 euros it costs to do so: what a rip-off!

I have to decide on overmany things before I can actually register. What do I want to be the name of my business? I’m guaranteed of getting the name Tmi Sam Hardwick if I want, but maybe that’s not so cool. The first person I asked for a suggestion gave Tmi Cock and the second one gave Tmi Nusnus. People are useless. I’m even thinking about Tmi Traubert, but it could eventually be embarrassing. Also, maybe I should have a name without the letter r to circumvent my speech defect (I can’t make the Finnish r sound properly).

Then I have to decide what to put down as my trade. Someone I know registered as “general” which sounds handy, but someone else advised against doing that. I don’t really understand the point of the whole thing.

Then I have to decide whether I want to be in the ennakkoperintärekisteri, whether I want to be in the työnantajarekisteri, whether I want to be vakuutusmaksuverovelvollinen and whether I want to be arvonlisäverovelvollinen. My people are currently working on deciding these important matters.

I started memorising good chess games last week. I’ve done five so far. I’ve also kept not eating meat for the time being. It’s saving me a surprising amount of money.

And in case it occurred to someone that it’s pointless to memorise chess games, here’s a piece of wisdom from Eliezer Yudkowsky:

The novice goes astray and says “My art failed me”; the master goes astray and says “I failed my art.”

Last week I started a project to wear a suit jacket on all weekdays. This was, I suppose, to generally restore or

in my life. I’ve been able to follow the plan, but any effects have been negligible. I shall keep monitoring the situation.

For this week I’ve decided to abstain from meat. I arrived at this decision after disgusting myself by eating a pile of meat the size of my head on Sunday. Thinking about things other than meat to eat has been so entertaining that I might continue doing it for even longer than a week. Here’s an artistic portrayal of my temporary farewell to eating dead animals – I call it “They were sausages”.

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

I actually slept fine last night but… yeah.

I also found a humorous column in The New Yorker. I didn’t know those things still existed!

I’m really looking forward to summer this year. I have some plans for it, and they should be simple enough not to fail to provide enjoyment, enlightenment and confusion. I also got a summer job today, satisfying my unending thirst for money while taking up a fairly small amount of time (and I can work at home). I had been contemplating the full-time option of being a security guard, but now I’m not going to bother. Everything’s coming up Milhouse! I can only hope that life is as good for everyone reading this, although that seems unlikely. I don’t know how much better my life can become without my head exploding from sheer contentment. All I need now is:

1) Less trouble sleeping (this has returned to problematic levels recently, such as right now)
2) Better motivation to be productive (looks like I don’t care about mathematics enough to not require motivation)
3) Better physical fitness (this could be actually be a lot worse)

The first summer songs of this year (as of today) are Se ihana soul-levy by Kauko Röyhkä, God Shuffled His Feet by Crash Test Dummies (oh yes I did!) and Here Comes Your Man by The Pixies. Also: can anyone tell me what’s so great about The Stone Roses? Of course not – The Stone Roses are rubbish. Just like Oasis are rubbish. Fact!

Just in case anyone was wondering whether religions are so confident in their truth that they don’t worry about how many people believe in it, the Vatican has informed the world that there are now more Muslims than Catholics. Ouch! An interesting quote from Monsignor Vittorio Formenti:

“For the first time in history we are no longer at the top: the Muslims have overtaken us.”

Ah yes, history. According to some experts it extends to over three hundred years ago!

The British media sphere is obsessed with itself, sometimes beyond belief:

That’s from the Guardian main (web) page. A news story about someone corpsing on the radio while reading the news. Okay, it’s someone pretty well known for their general reliability, so perhaps it’s a bit noteworthy – and she did corpse while reading an obituary. But it’s not just a news story: besides that there’s an internal blog post about corpsing, there’s Green herself writing about the corpsing, there’s a recording of the corpsing happening and a “special comment” column on the event by someone called Michael Simkins. Four, count ’em, four pieces of writing on this matter, plus the recording. On the front page. This isn’t disappearing up your own arse – this is when your head pokes through the other side.

Apropos of that, here’s my favourite bit of corpsing ever. Maybe it’s not as good if you haven’t listened to cricket on the radio.

Some company trying to import bikinis into Finland has run into trouble. The bikinis have several top bits so that you can change between them, but there’s an EU directive stating that a bikini has as many bottom bits as top bits. These are therefore underwear. So can they import them as underwear? No! The underwear-importing quota is full. I didn’t even know there was an underwear quota.

From Osama bin Laden’s Wikipedia article:

As a Wahhabi, bin Laden opposes music on religious grounds and his attitude towards technology is mixed. He is interested in “earth-moving machinery and genetic engineering of plants, on the one hand,” but rejecting “chilled water on the other.”

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