Where Is Joel?

The "Eye of God" as photographed by the Hubble space telescope.

I was recently an innocent bystander to a rather impassioned argument by a certain U of A microbiology undergrad as to why god does not exist.  Actually, to be more clear her argument was that as scientists the only sensible position to have on the existence of a deity is atheism.  I personally am not an extremely religious person and have not set foot into a church in over 6 years not, but the more I thought about this viewpoint the more it irritated me.  The premise of the argument was that as the existence of god was the most challenging of “the existence of god” vs. “the non-existence of god” to accept, the burden of proof falls upon the theist camp.

This notion is nonsense. The burden of proof falls on everyone. As scientists we have no right to call anyone wrong without being able to prove ourselves correct, and calling someone wrong without proof limits the possibilities of human imagination and as such the scientific process.  We now commonly accept many things that within the frame of reference of people at some point would have seemed ludicrous.  For example as one point the concept that the earth was not flat was nonsense. It contradicted everything our sense told us. The concept that time goes slower as we get faster??? Nonsense!!  That energy can only exist in multiples of distinct quanta??  Yeah….  That doesn’t make sense. How about the fact that the entire universe originated from a volume margins of magnitude smaller than the tip of my pinky finger? Laughable really. By calling views that don’t seem to correspond to our frame of reference wrong we inhibit ourselves from discovering truths.

So to all scientists out there, including the arguer in question, I urge you all to choose your own path when choosing whether or not to be religious. If the thought that in this universe, of which we have possibly barely scratched the surface of understanding, the thought of a being greater than ourselves having guided the evolution of this world and taking part in our day to day lives seems too ludicrous to accept to you than feel free to be atheists. If the thought that there is no way that having pre-marital sex will not send you to burn forever in the fires of hell seems silly than by all mean beat your bible fervently. Just do not force upon others the views that you espouse.  …  Unless of course you can prove god exists/does not exist.  In that case feel free to write me, I’m dying to hear from you.

I’ve for the last several years worked on events team for a campaign promoting positive nightlife in Calgary and Edmonton. Working on this events team has caused me to spend some time reflecting what a good nightlife scene and attitude can offer a city.

The obvious thing people always say is that bars economically benefit a city via providing jobs and profitable businesses. …  Yawn…  Yeah, that’s true, but seriously it’s unexciting and I think in this respect the contribution of nightlife to a city is marginal.  Many of the employees are students and would otherwise just get some other job like Starbucks and seriously, a lot of the employees who are not students should probably consider moving on with their lives anyway. I have no evidence for this but I would be surprised if the amount of wealth generation by nightclubs and bars in general was that great. (Feel free to call me out on this. I am actually quite curious.)

Nightlife contributes to cities in another way which I actually consider to be more important. It makes a city “cool”. Consider being in a city like San Diego. The city is not significantly more populated than Edmonton or Calgary.  Yes the population density is higher than Edmonton or Calgary, but it’s not nearly on the order of Metropolises like New York or London and it’s actually roughly the same as Regina. So what makes San Diego (one of my favourite citys) stand out when you are there. Yes, there is the fact that the weather is awesome. There is the fact you are close to the ocean. Seattle has both of those but does not come off as nearly as attractive of a city. San Diego makes you feel cool. When you go to a bar the bar is cool. The people around you seem cool. You feel kind of like a rock star. This makes a city both more attractive as a tourist destination (See Las Vegas) and as somewhere to live.

Next comes another way nightlife *can* contribute to a city which is does not in Alberta due to what I consider to be an attitude problem we have in this province.  When people go to bars in Alberta the primary goal for a large portion of the bar going population is to get wasted and for a large portion of the bar going population is to hook up. What this means is that the bar really isn’t a positive social atmosphere. When I go to talk to women about nightlife issues they always respond in a “Must evaluate this guy hitting on me to see if he’s worthwhile” way and guys are defensive because if I’m not gay then I am officially another guy hanging with them thereby reducing their chances of having sex. (Not that being gay would be any better…  Then I’d be “hitting on them” which they would probably also not like.)  What this does is reduces people’s ability to meet people they have no sexual interest in but who may interest them in other ways in bars.

Meeting people with common interests is the foundation of building vibrant communities in a city and it is communities within a city that make it successful. Take for example the bay area. Companies like Twitter can become successful because the technology community there not only provides support for new companies, but also an initial user base for new products. As an example of how nightlife can be successful two of my friends met at the Black Dog in Edmonton and they now collaborate on several projects including a company one of them is starting.  This however is rare. Guys out there, when was the last time you met a guy at a bar you ever talked to again? Also for those looking to have a one night stands decreasing the sexual nature of interactions makes it easier to meet people.

So in summary I think with a change in nightlife attitude nightlife can be a more positive influence on our cities.  And I gotta run.

Every year the U of A seems to have some kind anti-drinking campaign. They often are based around some kind of questionable social norming. AKA. “The average number of drinks a student has on a night out is 4.6.” or something. Usually the number presented is so laughable that you know there is something fishy about the statistics.

This year though the campaign is the worst. There are several posters involving the outcome of the evening as you drink more. And in every case they involve worse and worse outcomes as you drink more until you reach the “worst” outcome, which is always something ridiculous, but can also often be construes as the best possible outcome.

Poor advertising

Here at the most drinks the outcome is “walk of shame”.  This is college!  For many college students the best possible outcome for the night is walk of shame.  Basically the message this poster sends is if you are too drunk and having a shitty night drink more and something good will happen.  Not that I actually believe these posters really ever accomplish their goals, but still.  This is horrible.

Something you may or may not have all noticed of late is that the new cool thing for girls to wear this year is tights. (Leggings??? I’m not really sure…) There are girls running around everywhere in knee high boots, leggings and a tee shirt. Wearing this around two years ago would have looked ridiculous and totally out of place. Then 3 years ago girls were wearing around those pregnancy shirts which would have looked ridiculous two years before and…. Well you get it.

For men however there are no such similar rapid paradigm shifts in what we wear. One year big lapels are in, the next year small. One year big ties are in the next year small. Nothing game changing. Why is it that women’s fashion changes so much faster and more dramatically than men’s?

A while ago I read a study about the effects of clothing on male and female perception of the opposite sex. What it boiled down to was that how attractive men found women was primarily correlated to the woman they were looking at regardless of what she was wearing. How attractive women found men was strongly correlated to what the men were wearing and how they were groomed. Men can tell if a woman is good looking even if she is disheveled and wearing sweats and can tell they don’t find a woman attractive even when she is dressed to the nines. A below average looking man can, however, look very attractive by wearing properly fitting nice clothes and doing their hair. This puts moderately attractive women at a greater reproductive disadvantage with respect to their more attractive peers than moderately attractive men.

When a rapid paradigm shift in fashion occurs for a short period of time men are exposed to clothes on women they have not experienced in a long time or ever and are thus unable to evaluate how attractive a woman wearing the new clothes are. Women who are fairly attractive might then be evaluated by a man as being extremely attractive thereby closing the gap caused by men’s ability to generally to evaluate a woman’s attractiveness irrespective of what she is wearing. Because of this for all but the most attractive women it is reproductively favourable to frequently cause rapid fashion changes in order to break down the borders between them and the most attractive women. For men this need does not exist as we can already increase our attractiveness without having to break through social stigma of totally new clothes.

…
Just a theory, but I think it’s because of the way men and women react to how each other are dressed.

I have in the past complained about transparency in science in light of the whole Scott Reuben disaster which I seemed to be the only person in the entire world who got really mad about. This is about something different, the accessibility of science to the public.

It seems to me that over the last 50 years scientists have done an excellent job of alienating themselves. Just over half of a century ago people like Albert Einstein and Neils Bohr were celebrities. Thomas Edison was reshaping the face of the world. Galileo was so controversial and interesting in his time that we *still* talk about his life. People put fish on their cars with Darwin’s name in them. What scientists alive now so stir the imaginations of the public?

Stephen Hawking perhaps. David Suzuki?? People aren’t as captivated by science as they once were. In my opinion there are two primary reasons for this.

1) In an age of access to access to information, access to scientific information is still lacking. Status in academia is entirely based on publishing in reputable journals and reputable journals always charge to read the papers that are published.

2) Works that are published are often incredibly boring. I’m not sure when someone mandated that scientific writing needs to be dry. Obviously some disciplines like control theory are not very interesting and not much can be done but, seriously, if you did something worthwhile then you should at *least* be able to write an interesting abstract.

Given that I believe these are the problems what can be done? First we need to open up science. With many disciplines opening up via social media and sharing information more openly science needs to follow suit. PLOSone is a good start. Lets keep it up. I’m not sue what else needs to be done. Imma ponder this for a while.

Suggestions??

As much as I love Edmonton, for a few months in the winter it does become a very unpleasant place. It’s cold every day for months and the sun is up after I leave for school in the morning and down before I go home at night. I usually kind of spend these few months as a grumpy hermit with the only upside being grumpy hermits seem to get a ton of work done and I need to get said ton of work done! I was thinking yesterday as the sun ended it’s daily trek across the sky at shortly before 5 o’clock and the days were showing signs of not returning to warm for another 4 months, “This is really a very marginal climate”.

In economics there is a concept that when some sort of business is operating in a “marginal” environment, the profit it is able to make is what determines the profit of businesses in more prime environments. Let me do a simple quick glossy explanation. Say there are two Starbucks stores, one at the exit to a busy LRT stop where people are getting off for work wanting coffee and one on a quiet street corner where the occasional patron stops in on their way to whatever they might be doing. If the quiet street corner is the worst location a Starbucks can operate and make a reasonable profit then this is the marginal location. Now if the costs of operating the Starbucks in the train station are low enough that it makes more money than the Starbucks on the quiet corner it would make sense for the owner of the Starbucks on the corner to try and acquire the more profitable location hence driving up property/rent/other costs at the more profitable location until it is once again on par with the less profitable. Obviously not all Starbucks are equally as profitable, but the concept is still valid, economies just aren’t perfectly fluid.

This made me think about whether there was some such similar concept with regards to where we live and the happiness we derive from that location. If people in Los Angeles, where they don’t have as ludicrously short days or cold winters as Edmonton, were happier in general than Edmontonians then it would make sense for Edmontonians to leave Edmonton for Los Angeles. Is there some mechanism whereby the influx of people to the happier locations causes more pollution/crime etc. so that on a generational level the happiness of humans in all locations is determined by the happiness of the humans on the margin? Is there perhaps on the other hand some restrictive force causing human relocation and happiness to not be a fluid enough economic system for the balancing to occur? I can see that the latter might be the case if you were a starving farmer living day to day in a third world country, but on a generational level I can’t imagine a similar mechanism preventing relocation between countries of at least medium wealth? Immigration laws?? Hard to say. Interesting to think about though.

I received another interesting blog comment the other day:

“I’m going to be doing some anal on my site, just for you.”

Ok, this seems like pretty standard porn spam. What makes the comment interesting is that it links back to what actually looks like some kind of russian design blog. What a weird way to advertise your blog!

I ran across this website recently. The idea is that you upload “looks” that you tend to rock and then the community give you feedback on them. It doesn’t seem to have a very widespread audience, the concept seems ok though. Different people look good in different clothes, so to have a community where people can give you feedback on the styles you wear seems like not a horrible idea. I’m know often surprised by the clothes that people say they like on me.

So I signed up and put up a look. The picture looked very… Zoolanderish. LOL It’s kind of unnerving knowing that there are probably some jerks out there who would just tear into what you put up… So I don’t really know where this post is going, but here is the picture I put up of pretty much what I normally wear. Maybe I just felt like I needed some pictures on the blog. Check out trendmill and let me know what you think. It seems Montreal dominated right now, and I can’t see it catching on too much with all but the most fashion obsessed, but maybe many of us could benefit from putting a few outfits up and learning what people really think of what we wear?

Me as a model...

“I’ve searched ALL day for a blog about “Where is Joel” and I finally found one! I am very interested in your content, please write more.

…

haha. Does anyone ever ever search all day for a blog about “Where is Joel”??

Although when it comes to sports I live and breathe football. As a canadian I can’t help but appreciate hockey. Every since I was a kid and it drove me crazy when my Calgarian friends would cheer for the Gretzky led oilers I have been a Flames man. This season the Flames have, thus far, the third best record in the league at 7-2-1 as well as the highest scoring offence in the league. Prognosticators seem to believe that this might be the year. I should be overjoyed right??

Not so much… There are some concerning factors regarding the Flames run that I would like to point out.
- The flames have the 6th most goals per game scored against them this year.
- The flames have the 3rd least goals per game and only score as much as they do by having the highest scoring percent in the league. This may not be a sustainable situation.
- Despite Kiprusoff playing better than previously he still has a middling save percentage.

I’m not too sure how people keep claiming this is the best defence in hockey. My question comes back to my recent football post. How bad can this team be and have accumulated this record? Let’s say we believe the current record to be within 2 standard deviations of how many points this team should actually have. They currently accumulate points at a rate of 0.75 * possible points or rather have won 7.5/10 games. Lets just say they’ve won 8 games for argument’s sake. Were they a 0.45 team, or rather 22nd in the NHL then winning 8/10 still falls within a 97.5% confidence interval. What this means is that at this point all we can say with “confidence” based on the results so far is that the flames are in the top 2/3 of the league. Hopefully they make me proud and play the rest of the year like the 0.75 team they’ve been, but I’m feeling nervous!