Ego Surfing Gold. 1000th post.

Ego surfing is a fun activity. You can find several old discussions that you never knew about or strange twitters about demotivators that get translated into Esperanto or many other things. This find is however a strange thing that harks back about four years ago to the first post I made to this blog which was simulposted to the (edit deadlink)About Agnosticism/Atheism (edit deadlink) Forum and actually (edit deadlink) got traction on the other site that I never knew about. It's weird.

The posts itself was about hemisphere differences, wrestling with faith, and the typical categories of religious beliefs. I'm still on board with much of what I said then, but I have a bit more nuance in my understanding. I do think there is certain truths with emotionally accepting that God exists while intellectually not accepting it at all and I think the answers to the question "Why do you believe in God?" are very revealing in these cases.

It's also pretty nice to hark back to my first post here for another reason, this is my 1000th post to this blog. I've now posted to this blog about an average of once every ten days for all of my life (I turned 10,000 days old last July), though the blog started back in September of 2006.

Waiting in Line at Court...

So I had to go by the court today to take care of a ticket and see the judge. It's a pretty involved process that typically also involves hanging out in line. So there I was waiting at 10:00 for the 9:30 call to enter the courtroom and I overhear two people talking. The first is waxing poetic about an optimistic philosophy of life...

"When your car gets a flat tire on the way to a job interview you need to not cuss out your tire."

... Such an enlightened man, what could be his secret? The women he was talking to finally asked the relevant question...

"What month were you born... oh, you're a Virgo, that makes sense!"

... before going into a long story about how she was going to get her driver license back and then sue somebody.

And as I glanced at another women I overheard on the phone earlier leaving in a huff (she wants the house she bought while married with her husband to be all hers because she totally changed some names surrounding the deed without telling her husband and the Judge said 'maybe she should get a lawyer') I thought myself unworthy in the presence of these towering intellects.

Oh, something I made achieved moderate popularity!

Woot.

Introduced on this blog last February.

Sandwalk actually made a post about it.
Having actually borrowed it from another site!

And was added to a few other image sites.

http://imagechan.com/img/5078/Fractal%20Wrongness/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/themadlolscientist/2421967468/

-- And it was edited to remove the watermark. Somebody actually went to a minute amount of effort!



I actually own fractalwrongess.com after earlier this year the Non-Prophets talked about the concept of Fractal Wrongness by Keunwoo Lee. I fully understand that I just stole a picture of a fractal, plugged it into despair.com's diy demotivator maker and changed the general theme from one of describing the noun to a declarative statement with a little more brevity. -- But still. Something I made achieved moderate popularity... unlike this blog.

Amateur blogging and amphisbaenia.

So, the other day my young cousins brought some critter to me asking if it was a snake or a worm. I recognized it as an amphisbaenia, though reluctant to make the determination at the time (also forgot the word just remembered that there was a worm reptile). I told them to put it outside beyond the reach of their younger sibling (who initially found they guy). Wow, I thought to myself, I read about those things but never thought I'd see one. I looked for some more pictures of them on GIS then I remembered, that I had a blog and and a webcam. But, alas, I couldn't find the guy outside. So no, confirmation that I was right, my memories are fading perhaps it was just an odd looking snake that happen to look exactly like a worm. Perhaps it was a stick, or a piece of spaghetti... without pictures I don't know what to believe and I'm subject to second guessing. And considering there aren't any species of amphisbaenia in this area I could easily be wrong. Perhaps there's some other kind of snake that looks exactly like an earthworm with bright colors, seemingly two heads. Perhaps there's some kind of worm with a spine (from the feel of it). I just don't know.

The entire point of this post is to say, my amateurish 'wow that's awesome, let's not take and post pictures to my blog' style blogging will end. Pictures of cool stuff rather than second hand "it looked like a snake/worm, but also looked like it had two heads, was about four inches long and had some bright colors" in the future for me. Thank You. My apologies.

I'm fairly sure I got the order Squamata right.

Blogosphere as evolutionary algorithm.

What causes a story to propagate among mainstream media? Usually there is a combination of factors, but the main cause is it gets picked up by a wire service which other newspapers use to create the stories the propagate. This formation has shown to be the most useful due to the cost and profits of running a newspaper consisting of only custom content. Rather than self-produced content, one main service like AP runs a story and duplications are made from there.

For example, if we look at a news story such as:
Florida Democrats keeping their primary at January 29th despite threats from the party not to count their delegates. We see about 35 original stories on Google News, and 554 if we include the duplicates. We have a central source feeding the lesser sources. The propagation is mostly due to a centralized sources AP feeding stories from one source into multiple sources. The structure of the beast is such that news is centralized and duplicated, but the reasons for picking up the story for the wire is easily influenced. If the story isn't picked up, the success for that story to propagate is nearly nil.

Now, how does the evolution of blogosphere stories differ from this? What is the difference in the structure and propagation reasons. In the blogosphere a good portion of the content is either original or comes from traditional news sources (which in turn come from the wire services).

For example, the same story about Florida Democratic Party decision is picked up by the blog Pushing Rope, which references the blog The Buzz (run by a traditional newspaper) of Karen Thurman's response to the decision. As well as referencing the FDP's new website to try and make the national party give in, a Fox news article that says the DNC isn't, as well as a blog radio podcast about the story.

Blogs tend to echo the same story as well, though each with different input, and additional crosslinks. The stories aren't centralized and rather seem to form more of a mesh, and in different parts a tree. Such as the previous blog entry about breastfeeding on Facebook being carried through four different blogs each linking from one to the next.

Now, what causes the propagation of the blogs seems to be the real marked difference. Rather than having a single chance to set off a series of secondary pickups there seems to be a mesh of content. Rather than having the same story propagate out through all the blogs, stories tend to propagate through a sparse tree of blogs dedicated to the same sort of content. Certain blogs will link to other blogs and get a fairly broad listing of the story, though far from universal. And it all depends on how many people write about the story in question. Within the MSM paradigm, a single "picked up" event can make all the difference. Blogs amount to a decentralized specialized network for story propagation.

The decentralized structure has less ability to be managed or destroyed. For example if aliens destroyed the AP, the AP would be unable to report about it and a number of newspapers would be unable to carry the story. Bloggers, however, would be unaffected by the destruction of a large number of bloggers and blogs. The centralized structure for propagation allows for quick updates, for example if a story is several minutes old it is nearly impossible for any significant propagation among blogs to have occurred. Whereas MSM could already have achieved saturation. This MSM saturation could lead to the primary sourcing of the same story among many bloggers, fitting primarily into the centralized paradigm in such a situation.

Which provides better content? -- I would have to believe the blog content has typically been deemed at least interesting by multiple parties before the story appears, typically with some original content. And due to the specialization of the blogs themselves the content is more customized to the consumer.

Which is faster? -- Traditional media, is centralized and quick to respond to a story by creating thousands of locations for output for the identical story. It is doubtful that blogs could replace breaking news in any capacity.

Which is more robust? -- I would say blogging would be more robust simply because there is no head to cut off, nothing really to control.

Which is apt for tampering? -- If anybody could interject or prevent stories from being picked up within the centralized location then propagation of the story is nearly impossible. One could easily control the news with a centralized source, whereas a decentralized network would be nearly impossible to control. And nearly impossible to tamper with.

Which is biased? -- There is generally a concerted effort within MSM to be unbiased, though there is considerable problems with it, I daresay they should get the nod. They can actually prevent bias by being able to control the news, whereas many blogs are specifically biased towards one view or another. Though, they wear it on their sleeves... for example I am a godless, liberal, atheist, pro-choice, anti-death penalty, mythicist, in favor of universal health care... whereas Fox News is Fair and Balanced... they swear! Though there's a lot to the idea that if you know where somebody is coming from you can account for opinions. Very few people have a problem with Fox News having a bias, they strongly object to not admitting this bias.

Which is best? -- I don't know. Certainly there is a niche for story propagation here. Though, there may be different optimal propagation depending on the type of story. So far, it seems, that MSM is dying out or at least suffering at the hands of blogs. I'm obviously leaning towards blogging. Mainstream media has an advantage in that they can propagate information quickly, for breaking news important to everybody this is extremely useful. However, they never provide me with information about what's up in the atheist community, or what some particularly stupid creationist is doing this week.

Which provides better information? -- I don't know. The selection for the stories is not based on the truth content thereof, but the chance that the story is duplicated and blogged about for whatever reason. For example, there are a large number of people who actively blog about how vaccines cause autism, even though they don't, and never have. There is also a major difference between what MSM finds to be newsworthy vs. what users themselves find to be newsworthy. Which may cause a rather marked difference between information attained. A world affairs test might not be a proper metric as certainly MSM might do a better job at that than the number of atheism and science blogs I read. However, my religious and scientific knowledge compared to MSM users would easily be superior.

One primary difference between the two is the game theory strategy used. Mainstream media optimally provides the worst still important news available. The broadest and blandest, where the solution provided will still result in a net gain among all people. Mainstream media finds the best average appeal to a largest number of agents, whereas blogs can serve much more limited numbers of people with far more specialized content. So consumers have more control over the information they receive. So the fitness of a story with rapidly changing information is greater within the mainstream media, whereas a story about the closing of the Arecibo Observatory finds consumers more aptly and propagates better within a certain subsection of the blogosphere. Whereas the broad appeal of the story may be limited and thus isn't part of the best average solution, it could be part of a very specialized solution of astronomy or science blogs.

Is there something wrong with assuming everything has a purpose.

I believe there is. It's false.

It's a good assumption, in fact, I daresay it's an assumption you should make, even if it leads to nothing. Assuming there is a purpose for something, a reason for things, or a good solid answer to the why question... really does push inquiry. We learn a lot about physics when we ask "why the sky is blue", we learn a lot about biology when we ask "why plants are green". Why does pollen on water jiggle? Why do we always see the same face of the moon?

The problem with the question is, it's not actually true. Aristotle once wrote "Nature does nothing uselessly." -- strictly speaking, this is completely false... nature does everything uselessly. Purpose has no bearing on evolution. However, when we look at things in nature it's extremely useful to ascribe purposes to things. Hands are for holding. Teeth are for chewing. Legs are for running. Eyes are for seeing. Wings are for flying. If we look at it, the way nature actually works: those organisms with those traits survived better to build and expand upon their successful strategies. That's helpful in some ways, but the lie is seemingly more useful. When we look at the universe as being filled with purpose, we can say to ourselves, "Oh, wings are for flying... so when I build this airplane, I should build wings on it."

This way of thinking is useful, but not true. When we look on something and ask, "Why does the sun revolve around the Earth?" or "Why do we have an appendix?" or "What was before the Big Bang?" -- We don't have answers. But, people are inclined to shove a God-of-the-Gaps into these problems. This doesn't provide any utility to a person, and the only reason we assumed there was a purpose to things was because it's a very useful thing to assume. So basically, we're assuming there is an answer, and then shoving in a worthless answer to stop the inquiry. You might as well not ask the question, if you aren't going to honestly seek the answer.