Sunday Evening Blogging

Not too much going on at the Grafton household this weekend. I did a bunch of yard work type things. Mulching, weeding & feeding, moving stacks of firewood, etc... Though I didn't do much reading, I did find a book which proffers the idea that '0 is dangerous' and another book detailing Bertrand Russell's life. (He nearly went insane trying to prove mathematics is free of contradictions.) And it's a comic! I'll probably start it once I've completed GEB.

That's all I've got!

There, I Fixed It.

The Zalman CPU cooler I purchased for one of my computers four years ago finally bit the dust today. My computer began making a horrendous noise disturbingly similar to what I imagine whale mating calls sound like. Yet... is it more disturbing that I sit around and wonder what whale mating calls sound like?

I decided to replace the loud ass fan but I didn't want to purchase another $50 Zallman for a socket 939 mobo that's probably going to be replaced soon. So I whipped out a pair of tin snips, a (ridiculous) mess of thermal paste, and a soldering iron to cajole a cheapo 12V fan from Altex into the Zallman heatsink.

There, I fixed it.

Sunday Evening Blogging

Reality Does Not Care How You Feel

Red or Blue? I put it upon you, gentle reader, to examine both of these colors and carefully select one.

Have you made your choice? What process did you use to come up with your answer? Did you decide on red because photons humming along at the "red" wavelength are prettier than blue ones? Perhaps blue reminds you of an object you had as a child? Maybe red is the color of your hair?

Regardless of the reasoning behind making the choice, chances are that you prefer one color to the other. Most likely, you cannot defend rationally why you chose one color over the other. I can tell you that I generally prefer blue because... well I just like the way it looks.

Maybe it's because I've always been fascinated with pictures of the Earth from space. Do I like those pictures because they're blue or do I like blue because of the pictures? Unfortunately, when it comes to taste, rationality rarely plays a role in our decision making process.

However, rational decision making is one of the hallmarks of the human species (in my mind, at least). Most of the time, our decisions are automatic and don't require much expended brain energy. What clothes should I wear, what show to watch on TV, what kind of meal should I consume, etc...

Brain energy is not an infinite resource and we all seem to run at a forced deficit most of the time. We have children, work, household chores, media of all sorts, and family to distract us. All of this consumes our precious brain power. A good example; I've been attempting to get through a fantastic book, "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" for a couple of months now and I've only made it through a couple of hundred pages (600 more to go!). I find the book intellectually challenging and wonderfully written, though I routinely make the decision to not read it because (I'm to tired | I want to watch TV | The dog threw up on the sofa).

Admittedly, I need to take care of dog puke before anything else, I just don't have many excuses past the first two listed. For me, the decision is made by extrinsic forces (i.e. work was difficult today and made me tired). By putting the decision outside my rational control makes life much easier in the short term since I am able to merrily sit on my couch and watch television. Unfortunately, the longer the book sits on my desk unread, the more it taunts me with a pointy stick of guilt.

So, how does one make a rational decision? By internalizing the fact that reality doesn't give two shits about how I feel. This is a very difficult thing to accomplish for an emotionally bound, arrogant individual such as myself but the clear fact of the matter is that the book is sitting on my desk being unread.

The process for rational decision making is wholly dependent upon facts of a particular situation. Since the aforementioned daily decisions are not that complex and are generally dependent upon taste more than facts, let's create an artificial situation that requires a complex decision. Purchasing a new vehicle.

I'm not going to talk about what type of car you are going to purchase, that is mostly a matter of taste and as I've already said, taste is rarely rational. No, I'm going to talk about the thing that matters to most folks, expense. So, let's first take a look at our choice of cars via this one metric. For the sake of brevity and point making the cars we can choose from are thus:

$100 Blue

$500 Red

$1000 Purple

Rationally, what is the best car to choose based on our single metric, expense? The obvious choice is the Blue car because it's the cheapest. So what happens when the facts change and you're required to take in new information in order to make a decision?

Instead of purchasing a vehicle for yourself, you are purchasing one for your family. The situation has changed and so have the variables in your decision making process. The Blue car, while cheapest, also has the least amount of safety equipment. The Red car and Purple car have similar safety equipment. Your family's safety now plays a role in your decision making process. Their fiscal safety is not as important as their physical safety but almost so. (One tends to lead to the other.)

Choosing the Red car in this situation isn't an irrational decision even though it's more expensive. Anti-lock breaks, side impact air-bags, and crumple zones (Reds got'em, Blue doesn't) are more expensive but also safer. You make your decision based upon facts rather than simple emotion.

Does that mean emotion shouldn't be apart of any rational decision? No, of course not. If your situation gives you the fortunate benefit of not having to worry about expense, then by all means get the Purple car that you're lusting after. However, it's all too easy to allow emotion to cloud your judgement and purchase that Purple car knowing that it may be a problem in the future.

My point is that rational decision making is not based how you feel but rather how the facts fit the situation.

Sunday Evening Blogging

Since I'm feeling a bit under the weather tonight, I'm not going to write a long post on physics or math or skepticism. Originally, I had planned to write about very large numbers and how we as humans find it difficult to internalize them. This blog post does the subject much more justice than I could, however. I highly recommend you read his post and be prepared to have your mind blown (or at least a little tweaked). Also, you get to see what a million of something looks like.

The Family and I visited theMcNay art museum today. Not a whole lot to report. Alex was exceptionally well behaved (for a one year old) and the exhibits were pretty cool. I find art fascinating in a general sense but much of the subtly is lost on me. Science, robots, and computing take up too much of my brain.