Sixteen Volts

While my wife is reading and watching some recorded shows that she likes but I don't, I thought that I might try an interesting experiment to broaden my world a bit.

First, some background. In computer science and mathematics, local search optimization techniques are used for problems so that the search for the better solution starts from some state. This state has some other states as neighbours, and the search moves to a neighbour that is better. The search continues this way until a sufficiently good solution is found. The naive hill climbing algorithm always moves to the best neighbour, but this technique gets stuck to locally optimal solutions where all neighbours are worse or equally good. If you just move to the best neighbour, the next step might return you back to the local optimum, and that's where you get stuck and have no way out but a random restart. Other techniques such as simulated annealing and tabu search help avoiding getting stuck to local maxima, by loosening the discipline of selecting the neighbouring state to move to.

Because of the self-sustaining power law distribution of incoming links to web pages, when you browse the blogosphere you pretty much end up going around the same top blogs all the time. Perhaps it would be interesting to force yourself out of this loop by using the tabu search approach, in which the seach is not allowed to go to any state that it has been in before. So what I shall do now is I take a starting site that has lots of links to minor blogs previously untouched by my walking boots, and then keep browsing with the constraint that I am not allowed to go to any site that I have ever been in. Here, "ever" means roughly at least within the last two years or so that I can remember.

Of course I have to start this search somewhere, and that somewhere must be a place that I already know of. Since religions are closely associated with taboos, perhaps it would be poetically appropriate to start this trek from some high-ranking religious blog. At the first sight, "Evangelical Outpost" with its large blogroll seems to be a very good starting point. So for the next two or three hours or so, I shall follow the unknown links starting from that page and moving deeper, and invite the readers to come along by listing here all the interesting stuff that I happen to find along the way. I will generally look at only the front page of each blog, and will read more if I find anything really interesting at the front and the archives are not too difficult to find and browse.

First, the post "Test For Smart People" at "Lake View" made at least me chuckle. I didn't get any questions right, the impulsive and short-winded man that I am. Later my wife got the third one right when I asked her these questions. I guess she truly is my better half.

Since Catholics are not that common in Finland and our evangelicals are mostly pentecostals known for their dislike of premarital sex, speaking in tongues and stuff like that, I never really learned how large the ideological gulf between the Catholics and evangelicals really is until I became familiar with the blogosphere. Live and learn. In this light, the post "The seductions of ignorance" at "The Wardrobe Door" links to article "Evangelicals, beware the seductions of idolatry".

But tell me, Catholics, isn't C. S. Lewis truly a prime example of what happens when a smart guy takes a vow of irrationality? I also wonder if this enthusiasm of taking Catholic blog names from Narnia books will cool down a bit now that the movie came out. Latin names and Chesterton-inspired names sound so much cooler anyways.

Speaking of influential writers, I haven't read Da Vinci Code and probably won't, since as somebody who takes his marching orders from the objective reality I read very little fiction in the first place. Whatever important fiction has to teach me is far better distilled in the blogosphere itself. But when I thought about that particular book, I realized that the fact that the book has been continuously on top of the bestseller lists for now what, a hundred weeks or something like that, pretty much proves the claim I saw made years ago somewhere that I have forgotten: unlike the movie box office top ten lists, the bestseller lists of books never actually tell you how many copies each book sold, because this number would be so ridiculously low that it would defeat the whole purpose of publishing such a list. When a book is turned into a movie, it's a pretty safe bet that under one percent of the viewers who go see it have even heard of the book before that. This percentage might be a bit higher for Da Code, but in either case, the post "Evangelical Hypocrisy" at Challies notes that Christians who didn't complain about "The Passion of Christ" shouldn't now be complaining about Da Code either.

When I read the Bible myself for educational purposes in hope of learning good one-liners, I was surprised to learn that many things commonly taught about the Bible just weren't so in the Bible itself. For example, unlike the inspiring story that is taught to little and big children pretty much everywhere, David didn't slay Goliath with a well-aimed slingshot, but the stone merely stunned Goliath who David slew with his own giant sword. The post "Just How Powerful is the Pope?" wonders why other similar misconceptions prevail even among Christians who have read their Bible. (Make no mistake about it, Pope and his Church are truly powerful, as the page "Inquisition Is Active Again, Did They Murder Olof Palme?" explains. Don't you already sometimes feel a slight lump in your throat?)

Speaking of brave warriors in mold of David, the post "Remembering the Brave" at Stingray links to an inspiring story of a fallen warrior. No comment about the story itself (except perhaps we could imagine a leftist version of the same story, so that some gay guy had been killed by gaybashing rich fratboys and his life partner now wants to sleep next to him for the last time, while a drag queen dutifully keeps watch), but one explanatory paragraph kind of confused me:

Never leave a Marine behind. That’s a tradition dating back 230 years that is implanted inside every Marine at boot camp. That sometimes means that Marines get killed while retrieving another Marine’s body.

Now, I am not a military man, but it would seem to me that a rule this rigid could lead to rapidly escalating problems in certain situations. To begin with, I assume that it takes at least one Marine to carry one wounded Marine to safety, and while he is doing this, he is not really able to shoot his rifle Rambo-style from the hip to pick off the enemies. Now, suppose that an IED or RPG or something like that suddenly wounds enough men to start the escalation. Let's say five unlucky Marines are hit, and this explosion triggers gunfire from the enemy that has been hidden so far. Now, five other men have to go and grab these men, and pretty soon you could have ten wounded men on the ground. The next ten men now have to go carry these men to safety, making themselves vulnerable to enemy fire, and so on. I am sure that the whole thing really can't work this way, but certain common sense flexibility eventually applies. Perhaps the War Nerd could better explain this issue.

The post "The Loss of Innocence" at "Cerulean Sanctum" describes what a quaint small-town Christian feels when he encounters modern culture. In a similar vein, "Only five" at "Amy's Humble Musings" vividly illustrates the ideological difference between "red staters" and the parts of the blogosphere that I am more familiar with, in the sense of the much-discussed article "The Return of Patriarchy".

The post "Everybody's doing it... :)" at "Dappled Things" links to the site "SnapShirts" that can be used to generate a word cloud of your blog. Mine looks like this:

Another blog is also called "Dappled Things", this one by a Catholic priest. The post "IQ and National Identity" informs us that with respect to average national IQ of European nations, Britain ranks the eighth whereas France is in the nineteenth place. I have a somewhat Sailerian hypothesis about the reasons for this vast difference, but perhaps I shall now keep this hypothesis to myself. This post also reminds me of Jussi Halla-Aho's recent post about these national IQ rankings which I have been meaning to translate. You see, apparently some Finnish leftists, who normally oppose even the existence of IQ and denounce the whole concept as "elitist" and "racist", had used to these results to hapily mock Finns for their lower-than-Swedes IQ, because they thought that this somehow proves that Finland should take in more immigrants since we are not that great to start with ourselves. Apparently in their glee to mock Finns, these leftists had completely forgotten that many other nations (which I shall not name here) fare a lot worse in these IQ rankings. Once again, when chasing the rabbit, the hunter is blind to mountains.

As a teen, I naturally played Dungeons and Dragons. The post "Dungeons and STR+2" at Ales Rarus tells us what is the most well-known icon in D&D from a functional player's point of view. It's not a dragon, but something completely different.

When we remember that well over half of all Americans are young Earth creationists, this little fact sure isn't evident in the top tier of the American blogosphere, not even when we restrict the attention to explicitly politically conservative writers. In the leftist blogs, you can often see their own brand of lysenkoist creationism, in which all humans are functionally equivalent genetically and all their differences are therefore due to environment and nurture (and their differences in achievement come from evil capitalist oppression), but that's perhaps a little bit different thing. Hopefully the topic of creationism will become a bit hotter with Ann Coulter's next book "Godless".

That's that about that for now, since the Asian movie of the Saturday night is starting and we intend to watch it together. Perhaps next week I can do this again, with some other good starting point.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Saturday, April 22, 2006 at 6:32 PM