Regruntled.com

I was working on one of those programming problems that’s easy enough to solve if you don’t mind running your computer for a billion years to get the answer, and I wondered: how much processing power does God have?  Does He have infinitely many cores running at infinitely many gigahertz?  Does He have infinite RAM and infinite disk space?

The traditional ideas about God predate computers, so omniscience doesn’t include infinite processing power.  In the case of my programming problem, God would magically know the answer without having to do the calculations.  Intelligent Design, a modern notion, does seem to require some processing power.  Design implies figuring out the consequences of design choices.  If One magically knows the answer in advance, there’s no design going on.  In the case of the fine-tuned universe argument, we would have:

And so God considered all possible combinations of values for Planck’s constant, the gravitational constant, and the speed of light, and ran trillion-year simulations of each combination, and chose the values we see today.

Instead of:

And God said, Let there be light.  And there was light.

Belgian conceptual artist Wim Delvoye tattoos pigs and sells their skins as art. I suppose that’s worse than putting lipstick on them, but not as bad as grinding them into sausage.

There is a famous chess puzzle that calls for placing 8 queens on a chessboard such that no two queens can attack each other.  In other words, no two queens can be on the same row, column or diagonal.  This puzzle is of some historical interest in that it caught the attention of mathematicians like Gauss and Cantor, but nowadays it is easy enough to solve by computer that it is given as a homework problem in programming courses.

A sudoku is 9-by-9 instead of 8-by-8 like a chessboard, but the restriction on rows and columns is similar. A sudoku doesn’t have any restrictions on diagonals, but it does have the restriction on 3-by-3 blocks.  What happens if we add the sudoku block restriction to the 9 queens problem?  The 9 queens problem is known to have 352 solutions, and it turns out that 144 of them satisfy the sudoku restriction.

The next question is whether 9 of these 9-queens patterns can be combined into a sudoku.  The answer is no.  There is just no way to do it without the patterns interfering with each other.

If you liked Cool Surge, the overpriced swamp cooler, you’ll love Heat Surge, the overpriced space heater:

It uses about the same energy as it takes to run a coffee maker.  Yet, it produces an amazing 5,119 BTU’s.

Nothing amazing about it.  It’s a 1500-watt electric space heater, and if you do the math, 1500 Watts is 5119 BTUs per hour.  If you run a 1500-watt coffee maker for an hour, it will also produce 5119 BTUs of heat, most of which goes into the coffee.

The Heat Surge is yours free if you buy an Amish-made “solid wood” box ($338 for cherry, $298 for oak) plus $49 shipping.  Note that the boxes are “solid wood”, not “solid cherry” or “solid oak”.  From the BBB report:

The company’s position is that according to the standards of the furniture industry, a product that uses veneers over real wood qualifies as being made of solid wood. BBB staff have since examined the mantle units and determined that the mantle is comprised of several layers of wood with veneer finishing.

Meanwhile, I did some googling and found a 1500-watt space heater at Lowe’s for $15.  That’s less than one-third the cost of shipping the Heat Surge.  But, hey, you can’t put a price on Amish craftsmanship.

I find this stuff very entertaining.  I sit down with the Sunday paper and there’s a fake article about a fake bargain on a fake fireplace inside a box of fake wood.  What a country!

Intrade has a contract that pays off if Joe Biden withdraws, voluntarily or involuntarily, his Democratic VP nomination.  (This contract appeared a few days after the Palin withdrawal contract, so I suspect that someone shamed Intrade into it.)  Thursday morning I noticed that the contract had been bid up to 7.5, meaning a 7.5% chance that Biden will withdraw. 

Biden said on Wednesday:

Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president of the United States,. She is qualified to be president of the United States of America. She is easily qualified to be vice president of the United States of America, and quite frankly, might’ve been a better pick than me.”

I interpreted this as a roundabout way of implying that Sarah Palin is not qualified, not because she’s a woman, but because she’s not Hillary.  And maybe Biden was sucking up to the Hillary supporters just a bit.  Apparently others interpreted this as an indication that Biden would step down, making way for Hillary to ride in on a white horse and save the election for the Democrats.  Well, of course I sold a few contracts short, but what fascinates me is that the rumor is not really about Biden.  It’s about Hillary.

Hillary looms over this election, larger than life.  When she lost the primaries, people thought she could capture the nomination with the help of the superdelegates.  People thought her supporters would do something at the convention.  Now that Obama has chosen Biden, they think that Biden might step down.  Intrade still shows Hillary with a 3% chance of winning the Presidency in November.  The recurring theme is that somehow Drama will trump Reality.  People are waiting for the writers to introduce the last-minute plot twist that will elevate Hillary to the position she rightfully deserves.

Jonathan Haidt writes at The Edge:

What makes people vote Republican? Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies?

But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer “moral clarity”—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.

“Cognitively inflexible” sounds better than “bitterly clinging to guns and religion”, I suppose.  There seems to be a cottage industry devoted to explaining Republicans, rather than appealing to them.  Condescension is not a viable strategy.