bustermcleod: Kellianne's sick and I'm restless at home. Anyone have a teleporter to fun?

Buster M. @ Marco's Supperclub ! Patio
2510 First Ave
Seattle, WA 98121

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

Buster M. @ Crocodile Cafe
2200 2nd Ave
Seattle, WA 98121

Buster M. @ Tavolata ! Drawing Europe with my gimmick
2323 2nd Avenue
Seattle, WA 98121

Buster M. @ Viceroy
2332 2nd Ave
Seattle, WA 98121

I know this isn't going to make me popular, but I think Occam's Razor is bullshit.

It just is.  I can't give you a simpler rebuttal than that, so it must be true.

A dozen things are happening right now and the emotional responses to them are all conflicting, clashing, entangling, and smashing into each other in a giant way.  Things are good, great, bad, terrible, exhausting, inspiring, scary, and so comfortable.  How is it possible to have all of these emotions at once?  I'd think my brain would cancel conflicting things out, but somehow they just all sit there side by side, impossibly.  Since they can't resolve themselves, or even look at each other, they just stretch everything out into a big space... so that they don't seem so near each other but are still all inside me.  Know what I mean?  I used to have a resolver emotion that just chose a winner and pushed everything else out, but that resolver emotion seems to have been pushed out himself by these crazy, gigantic, mushy, emotions that roll around and----

?

I can't help but think that this big big space is being made in preparation for something.  For a bigger experience of life, where the lambs and lions of giant conflicting emotions live in peace together, and a new kind of mindset emerges that understands how that all works, and works together because it's actually natural.  Actually the way things should be, the way things are.  And with this giant space you can take in giant things hook, line, sinker, fishing pole, boat, and ocean.  The blind men can understand the entire elephant.  You can close your eyes and travel up and down your arm as if there were light years to your fingertips and yet millimeters at the same time.  People you love inflate into giant paradoxical balloon animals filled with magic, surprise, wonder, torture, pain, love, vulnerability, and energy.  All of the dimensions unfold into a single point.

What’s new? You might have noticed a few new features on 43places lately. Here’s a quick run down of some of the new stuff we’ve been working on.

• Entry Types: We’ve added “entry types” that let you classify the type of story you are telling about a place. We hope these may give you some inspiration as to the sorts of stories you might want to tell. Find the entry types by writing an entry about any of the places on your list. Still want to add your own title; select “A story about this place” and it works the same as it ever did.

• Tag Browsing: We’ve reworked the way tags are working on the site. Now anyone can tag anything, wheteher they’ve been there or not. So if you are in to organizing, help us describe places with tags. You can also get a taste of the new way to browse tags we are developing by going to a city (like Seattle and clicking on one of the tags on the right such as restaurants, bar, or park. From there you can refine with related tags as well as narrow down (or scale up) the geographic area you are interested in.

• Events: We’ve recently added the ability to add an event to a place and also created a way you can tell people in your city what events you are attending. For example, check out all the shows Todd is going to lately (you can see them on the right hand side of profile page). The astute will notice that we’re collaborating with Upcoming.org to import events from their site as well for specific cities. You’ll notice these events because they are linked back to Upcoming under the event name.

• Check-ins: I think we talked about this before, but we’ve also added a feature that lets you “check in” at a place where you are a regular. You can do this from the website, from email, or from your mobile phone. It’s a fun way to track your visits and start to see the places where you are a “regular”. For an example, check out the spots Erik frequents (you can see them right below the map on his profile page).

More to come We have lots more work we are doing on this push to improve 43 Places, but we’d love to hear from you. Have a great idea for what we should be working on? Add your idea to http://ideas.43places.com or send us an email at local@43places.com.

Thanks!

Erik Benson went to this event.

Social commentator and author of "The Geography of Nowhere":http://www.allconsuming.net/item/view/18193 and "Home from Nowhere":http://www.allconsuming.net/item/view/19402, "James Howard Kunstler":http://www.kunstler.com/ has written a shocking and pessimistic vision of a post-oil future. In his new book, "The Long Emergency":http://www.allconsuming.net/item/view/26731, he contends that the depletion of nonrenewable fossil fuels is about to radically change life as we know it, sooner than we think. Downstairs at Town Hall, enter on Seneca Street. Tickets are $5 at the door only. Town Hall members receive priority seating.

Erik Benson went to this event.

Distinguished historian Simon Schama, author of the bestselling history of the French Revolution, Citizens, writer and host of the lauded BBC series A History of Britain, and professor of history and art at Columbia University, has written a new history of the thousands of African American slaves who fought for the Crown during the American War of Independence. Rough Crossings tells the little-known story from this era which saw a mass emancipation of slaves in the Americas – not by the revolutionaries but by their enemies. Seattle Times book editor Mary Ann Gwinn interviews Schama about his fascinating and important new contribution to the history of the Revolution and of slavery in America. Downstairs at Town Hall, enter on Seneca Street. Tickets are $5 at the door only. Town Hall members receive priority seating.

Erik Benson added an entry about Complete "The Artist's Way":

I did 5 out of 7 of the morning pages… which are actually turning into my favorite part of this Artist’s Way thing. They’re slowly evolving from random ramblings into more of a structured rambling with lots of daydreaming and drafts for secret blog posts.

I’m looking forward to week three.

While brushing my teeth, thinking about this great article, Blowing Up, which I had been reading before taking a shower, which had provoked a conversation with K about predicting the stock market, a picture of a crazy mental model appeared in my head and I want to try to explain it (as much for myself as for anyone else). It brought into focus a lot of my thoughts on certainty, randomization, and decision-making... but it’s quickly slipping away. Type, little fingers, type!

Imagine that there are three people, and each of them has been given a slot machine that, each time they press a certain button, will either show a white screen or a black screen based on some unknown internal algorithm. It is their duty to try to correctly guess the color of the next button press more than 50% of the time. They will be instructed to press the button 1 million times, to give them ample time to study the system, create their own guessing algorithm using whatever means they want, in order to meet their goal.

Who has the best chances of winning?

Of course, there’s no way to know which of these three people will win because we don’t know anything about the people or the machines they’re using. They could all be using machines that alternate between white and black, at which point it will just be a test to see who is lucky enough to catch on first. Or maybe only one of them has that machine and so he will obviously win. In other words, if you and I were betting on who was going to win, we’d both have a 50% chance of winning that bet. This is really odd. Without knowing anything about the system, or about the types of machines they’re using, or about the probability of any one of these people from achieving their goals… a probability of winning our bet has been created. Something from nothing. But does this something have any real value?

Okay, now imagine that you know that person A is at a machine that, at each flip, has been programmed to have a 50% chance of showing a black screen and a 50% chance of showing a white screen. Person B is at a machine that, at each flip, will first randomly select a probability in between 0% and 100%, and then, based on that probability it will then use that percentage to determine whether or not to display black versus white. Person C is at a machine that has another person that controls the machine and tells it each time what color to display, but you know nothing about this person’s motives for displaying the color that they do.

Okay, so now you know what these people are up against. If you were to guess which person would win, would your chances of winning be any better than before? I don’t think they would. At each flip, each person still has a 50% chance (from our perspective) of being able to choose the right color. Their chance of choosing the right color may be much higher or lower than 50% actually, but we have no way of knowing, and so that makes it settle at an even 50% for us. Am I missing something here? Isn’t it odd that a 50% chance is the same as an unknown percentage chance when two choices are involved? With the person behind person C’s machine, they may fall into a pattern, but at each flip they are still equally likely to abandon that pattern as continue it, because you have no way of knowing if the pattern you’re seeing is real or imagined. Just for fun, imagine that the person behind person C’s machine would choose a color based on his ability to correctly guess what another person at a machine would guess.

Maybe this seems obvious to you, or maybe I’m completely neglecting some obvious truth… but is it the case that probability doesn’t really exist? That probability is merely a fancy way of talking about the lack of knowledge? That probability is merely a local view, from the location of any particular decision, of a completely random environment that may or may not follow your expectatations? That has a certain probability chance of following your expectations, and therefore a certain probability chance of acting any particular way at all? That a 50% chance between two things is the same as a 100% chance between two things if you don’t know to which side the 100% applies?

If this is true, then I’m pretty sure it has heavy implications about anything that we do that involves probability. Anything that is not a result of absolute certainty becomes a result of absolute randomness. Without probability to cushion us from the fall into chaos, and without the assurance of anything being certain, our only option is complete, impossible to decipher, randomness in everything.

And it turns out that everything involves probability. Can you think of anything that has a probability of 0% or 100%, or rather no probabilty at all but rather complete certainty? I was just thinking about this the last few days and then came across a huge body of prior thought by philosophers going all the way back to the invention of thinking that have pretty much ruled out certainty as a possibility. Oh, then the lack of certainty must be a certainty, you say. Well, I don’t think we’re even certain of that.

What about self-definitions—one equals one, a rose is a rose, etc. Anyone can be certain that a thing is itself. True, but that’s called circular logic, the reflexive property of equality, and it has little to no value in the field of logic that I know of unless it’s applied to other more complex notions of equality. Certainty isn’t valuable to me unless it leads to other certainties, unless it eventually leads to the transitive property of equality at some point. For example, my meta-fundamental purpose requires that I be certain that I have fulfilled my fundamental purpose, in the hopes that I could then define a fundamental purpose and know when I’ve completed it. There’s no way I can be certain of that… all I can be certain of is that my fundamental purpose is my fundamental purpose, or that my meta-fundamental purpose is my meta-fundamental purpose. Who cares?

On the other hand, if you look at it a little differently, you can say that 100% probability is everywhere. That this coin has a 100% probability of landing either heads or tails, as long as heads or tails are the only two options. And it’s this type of probability (which isn’t probability at all really, just silly word and number games) that all of science is based on. Every theory has a potential to be disproven, but the fact that there is a way to disprove them (google falsifiability for info on the value of theories being able to be disproven… damn, I just realized that Google is really just the world’s best wiki) and that so far they haven’t given them credibility of having a higher probability of being true. But that’s just not true. Imagine that you’re on coin flip number 11, and in your previous 10 flips you flipped all heads… that doesn’t mean that your coin has a higher probability of flipping heads next time. Every theory is a single flip away from being disproven, and that flip has a 50% chance of proving the theory false (or a randomly selected chance, or a God-determined chance, or a chance given to it by 1,000 monkeys that are flipping coins). Past performance has no effect on future performance. Everything is completely random at every step.

Can this be true? Am I imagining a fake scenario or a real one? I give myself a 50% chance of being right.