Have you ever considered that a person generally expects a marriage proposal to include an engagement ring made of a precious metal like gold? Rarely is a spoken or paper promise sufficient to purchase an option to marry your lover.

Engagement is a marriage call-option purchased from your lover (sell-write) and purchased with a specified quantity of gold (buy-write). At any time the proposer is free to abandon his call option, including on the wedding date, but by doing so he loses his gold (hence why it is an option).

This also acts as a form of protection for the proposer: the proposed must either return the ring of precious metal to exit the contract (buy-to-close) or execute the marriage on the call date (execute option).

Why haven’t federal reserve notes replaced this gold-based institution? Because fiat money comes and goes but gold is, was and always will remain money.

I have spoken before on the subject of police:

Tax men. A modern-day incarnation of the Sheriff of Nottingham. They help steal from the poor and give to the state through a litany of so-called-crimes like “speeding”, “public intoxication” and “illegal parking”.

The Highway Patrol are the worst offenders. It seems that the Highway Patrol officers in Utah are unsatisfied with their role as regressive taxmen — they want to terrorize civilians too!

Watch this video where a State Trooper named John Gardner apears to believe it is an acceptable use of force to Taser unarmed civilians before they show attempts to struggle while giving a speeding ticket:

Gardner does not attempt to handcuff Massey without the use of a Taser. This is in stark contrast to the man who had multiple security personnel attempting to handcuff him by hand before using Tasers while John Kerry was attempting to give a speech. Nothing suggests that Gardner used force as a last resort. I imagine that in an earlier era before Tasers, Gardner would have shot and killed the man.

Amazingly, people in Utah want their police officers to assault and arrest them as often as possible, as evidenced by the following editoral in the Salt Lake Tribune:

If you watched closely, and heard Gardner order Massey to put his hands behind his back, there’s no doubt that by walking away, Massey was resisting arrest. There’s no doubt that the use of the Taser was justified; that an attempt to physically subdue Massey may have forced both men into oncoming traffic

The officer was out of line to attempt to arrest the victim; he was further out of line to assault the man with a “non-lethal weapon” just to assert his authority.

Thank God the officer was able to restrain himself from tasering the pregnant lady. The fact that, luckily, the victim was not killed by this police officer tasing him was merely by chance.

Thank God we have video cameras and YouTube. The buried, positive aspect of this story is the fact that the victim was able obtain footage of the entire incident by requesting it from the county records. As much as we decry the draconian state of affairs in this country, remember that we still retain a great deal of authority to make things right again. There are a great number of countries where this crime would have gone unnoticed; in the United States this family are likely to be acquitted on their speeding charge and receive a meager sum of money from the city or state for the damage they caused the victim.

Still, that does escape the fact that Utah’s Highway Patrol failed miserably in this encounter with the public. The Highway Patrol claims to aspire to the following values:

• “above reproach in dealing with the public”
• “sincere and honest”; “open and honest communication”
• “make decisions based on organizational values”
• “deliver service that reflects a concern for the quality of life”
• “allow only those of exemplary character to enter or remain in our ranks”

Due to the clever thinking of the accused to release the video to YouTube, the investigation into the officer’s actions has bee expedited. At a minimum they can live up to the “or remain” aspect of their values.

But are these actions the result of one bad apple named John Gardner or the entire organization? If you go to their more personal website website, they appear to find it appropriate to play a gunshot sound whenever you mouse-over any of their links. I am not sure how shooting people with guns and tasers so recklessly shows concern for the quality of life of their communities.

Further dubious activities by the Highway Patrol:

• At no time during the video does the officer, John Gardner, read the accused, Jared Massey, his Miranda rights, despite the victim asking for them.
• Towards the end of the video, the police officer also enters the vehicle to perform a search. The officer does not have a warrant. The police officer only said he was suspicious of speeding. Therefore, he has no probable cause to search for evidence related to anything aside from speeding. Had Gardner found anything, this would constitute an unwarranted search unless Mrs. Massey had given the policeman permission; the evidence would be inadmissible in court.

I would stay as far away from Vernal and Utah as possible until they get things in control over there!

Check here for other Bad Cop News.

I sat beneath a cherry tree,
A skeleton still in early spring.
Buddings dotted her branches,
Just beginning their life.

I returned to that tree next week.
The buds were in full bloom now.
She filled the sky with pristine white.
I went to have a closer look.

A rock tripped me though.
I hadn’t noticed him there.
I held him in my hand, feeling his heft.
He felt smooth, the edges worn away.

“You are millions of years old.
You have seen mountains rise.
You have seen oceans fall.
How incredible your life must be,” I told him.

I returned to the tree a third week.
There was but one blossom now.
She was almost a skeleton again,
Erupting with beauty no more.

A faint breeze passed by me then.
I saw that blossom shake, then fall.
The final blow dealt.

The blossom floated down onto the rock.
They shared a moment, young and old together.
The serene moment ended with the next gust though.
And I watched the pedals stream down his face.

I picked up the blossom,
Still beautiful as ever.
I realized how similar our lives were.

“Oh cherry blossom,
Our lives are fragile and short, yet
The rock stands forever idle.
The world teems with our energy.
We find more beauty in two weeks
Than he in eternity.
How lucky we are!”

I imagine there was a large amount of, “why?” “how could this happen?” “this makes no sense” type sentiment after the recent shootings at Virginia Tech. This type of thinking is, while understandable, silly. In fact, I think it is amazing these things do not happen more frequently. The fact that someone slaughtering 50 people can cause grief across the nation — nee, the world — is about the strongest testament to the safety and luxury we enjoy as anything else I can imagine.

We should accept that these types of events will, on occasion, in our society, transpire. Trying to find excuses for the nature of humanity — video games, violent movies, poor air quality, whatever — applies but only tangentially. The truth is that they occur because we live in a society that purposefully allows bad behavior and poor decision-making but, paradoxially, never expects truly harmful behavior to happen as a result.

If you want to look for reasons why the Virginia Tech shooting happened, here are three reasons why:

1. We place very little social pressure on people to behave a certain way. We are likely to console the murderer’s family and the school. Were we to arrest or kick the family out of the country, fine the teachers and administrators, and bankrupt the school, someone probably would have raised a larger warning flag and connected the dots. But we believe that collecitve punishment is inappropriate. People generally think the book 1984 is not the kind of place in which they wish to live.
2. We have very rudimentary means for judging someone’s emotional health and rationality. If we had some sort of invisible hand guiding people toward patterns of thought that increased emotional health, there would be far fewer unhappy people — unhappy people willing to shoot up a school. There would also be fewer groups of people who think it is rational to ask a priest to perform an exorcism, leaving more room for more effective psychological treatment. As we do not have this invisible hand, we err on the side of caution and treat nearly all forms of thinking as equally healthy and rational. Our failure rate is pretty high when we do otherwise.
3. The most important thing: We do not really think a few people getting shot up is a very big deal. Sure we talk a lot of talk — or at least the 24 hour cable networks do — but at the end of the day, we value our freedoms more than we value the lives of those 50 random people. The 300,000,000 people who were not murdered by some crazy college student place real value on our freedom to say things without having to worry that the thought police are going to come and arrest us. I am sure that we could have made the lives of those 300,000,000 people miserable enough that a depressed lunatic could not have murdered the 50 unfortunate victims at Virgina Tech. Even if you think this is an acceptable tradeoff — something we should do — were this the case, the resulting despair would more than make up for the difference in a higher suicide rate.

Still, if we want to play the blame game take a gander at this:

Below the fold, the Post looks back at Virginia Tech shooter Cho Seung-Hui’s last year of life, revealing that last summer, Cho’s mother sought help for her son at a local church, where the minister believed he needed deliverance from “demonic power.”

It is absurd that any person living on earth in the 21st century still talks about “deliverance” and “demonic power” in a manner other than jest. The fact that half of this country and the majority of the planet still thinks this way is mind-numbing. The boy’s family, teachers and friends should have been talking with their son, trying to understand why he was so angry, and gotten him some real help — theraputical, medicinal, whatever. Taking him to a preacher and saying a bunch of Hail Mary’s every night is irresponsible.

Have I been reading The God Delusion? Why yes, I have. How is it you can tell?

Previously: defending my belief that God exists, discussing what that means and why Dawkins is intolerant.

Jake Mandell is my hero. This guy is into neuroimaging and writes electronic music. It would be hard for me to think of a more intriguing resume. Check out his blog, his music and (especially) his tone-deaf test!

Awhile back Robert Wright interviewed Lorenzo Albacete, an ex-Physicist turned Theologist and Catholic University president. He makes an amazing point: while science can explain how things work the way they do, science does nothing to answer the question of why. Science — at least in its present form — is not capable of addressing these problems.

Science explains things in a completely different way to the way we personally experience them. The last chapter in Phantoms of the Brain — Do Martians See Red? — addresses this conundrum. Science can explain how we see things — the cells in our eyes that respond to specific frequencies of light that then enter our brain and excite other cells that activate other cells that have stored the concept of red. But this is categorically different to how we actually see red; Science explains everything from bee dancing to color vision the way a deaf person would explain the experience of listening to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.

Some people suffer strokes that make them blind. They say they cannot “see” anything. Ask them to put a paper into a slot that is either horizontal or vertical, studies show that a few will succeed every time. These people “see” in one sense of the term, but they damaged enough of their brain to render them incapable of experiencing seeing. These people are visual automatons.

Why do we not do everything in this automaton fashion? Why do we stand resolute, insisting against all evidence: “I exist. I am. Cogito ergo sum“?

Science cannot answer these questions. Science is not interested in these questions. Science simply concludes, “because”. Things exist; we exist; we see red; we love; this is how the world works; end of question; lets stick to answering how does all this work, how did things come to be…

But I am not here just because.

Yes, my body is here because of my parent’s DNA, the laws of Physics, the need for life to beget life.

Yes, my mind is here because of the endorphins, electrons and chemicals swirling around my brain and body.

But I am not my body.

I am not mind.

I am me. Myself.

My soul.

No one can take this away from me. No one can give this to me. It is completely personal. I created it for myself. It is made by me, for me, of me. Simply,

me.

From Slate

In the hunter-gatherer era, if we didn’t find food, we died. In the agricultural era, if our crops perished, we died. In the industrial era, famine receded, but infectious diseases killed us. Now we’ve achieved such control over nature that we’re dying not of starvation or infection, but of abundance. Nature isn’t killing us. We’re killing ourselves. 

Nor is this just a problem in America. Obseity is a global problem.

[For] every two people who are malnourished, three are now overweight or obese 

We need to address this issue.

In a ballsy move, AOL has released search data that — while absent the user’s login — contains a uniquely identifying id number. You can tell a lot about a person based on what their search habits:

The searches of AOL user No. 672368, for example, morphed over several weeks from “you’re pregnant he doesn’t want the baby” to “foods to eat when pregnant” to “abortion clinics charlotte nc” to “can christians be forgiven for abortion.”

Read about the different classes of internet users at Slate.

I hold no hope that I will ever see a cent of the social security taxes Uncle Sam takes out of my paycheck.  When I retire, I will have to live off of whatever pennies I stash away in my bank accounts.  Hopefully my jar of pennies will be large enough for me to put those pennies to work in CDs and bonds earning me enough pennies to get by without raiding the jar.  That is the goal.  How to get there?

Many people want a tattoo.  Many get them, but others avoid the negative stigma.  As you go up the social ladder, the number of tattoos per person goes down — rapidly.  They also sag; the vivid red flower on your shoulder becomes the distored red blob on your back as you age.  The stigma in Japan is worse.  Tattoos are associated with the Yakuza (mafia) and are forbidden from public places — pools, baths, etc.

The solution: invisible, fluorescent tattoos.  No one will notice them at work.  When you go to the club, you and your body transform into super glow-in-the-dark raver man.  Then when you stop partying, you will never seem them sag.

The first person to invent and patent invisible, blacklit tattoos will strike it incredibly rich.  He will have more than enough pennies saved up in the bank to retire and never worry about spending them all.  Good luck!

The New Yorks Times, fascists that they are, want to arrest people who don’t vote; they don’t like low turnout (or is it just losing?).

Australia has mandatory voting. It sucks; it is wrong; it does not mimic how humans are designed to resolve disputes. Think of this classic example:

You: “Where do you want to go to dinner?”
Friend A: “I’ve been wanting Chinese recently…”
You: “Yeah, sounds pretty good.”
Friend B: “Blech! I hate Chinese! How about Indian?”
Friend A: “Sounds okay to me”
You: “Fine by me”

Where do you go to eat? Indian. Although both you and friend a’s first choice is Chinese, you do not go there because friend b’s strong opinion against Chinese outweighs the two of your mild feelings for Chinese.

In a democratic system, you would eat dinner at Chinese. Chinese makes the most number of people the most happy. But this is the wrong choice; it also makes the most number of people the most unhappy.

Indian is the best choice. It minimizes the unhappiness, which maximizes the group happiness. Everyone will have a better experience if no one is ruining the atmosphere and complaining.

In a healthy social environment, people try to delegate their decision about a choice to the person who feels the most strongly about it — especially if it is a strong negative opinion. This is why decision making generally takes more effort than is necessary. This is probably a close summary of the last time you went out to lunch with others:

“Where do you want to eat?”
“I don’t know, you have any ideas?”
“Well, I don’t really feel like Mexican. I’ve been eating a lot of that recently.”
“Hmm… we could go to that sushi place we went to last time. That was pretty good.”
“Yeah, well what about a burger joint?”
“Sounds a little heavy… What about Italian?”
“OK, sure”

Notice how complicated this interaction is. The conversation is designed to evolve into a consensus, rather than simply gather each person’s opinion. These are some of the tricks:

• Asking the other person’s opinion first is not just asking for their opinion, it is also conveying a lack of conviction on your part (bonus: contrast this with a first date request).
• Stating a negative choices — what you don’t like — limits the domain, and prevents the possibility of a conflict where one person really wants something the other person hates.
• Suggesting previous positive experiences — where you have been before — is a safe bet but also reminds the group of their shared successful history.
• Omitting the rejection; expressing a complication with a suggestion serves to inform the other party why the choice is not desirable, but also gives that person the opportunity to continue advancing the choice by solving the complication (“Oh, this place has great salads too!”) if he/she feels strongly about it.

None of this social etiquette carries over to democratic elections:

“What do you want?”
“I want sushi”
“I want burgers”
“I want sushi”
“Ok, we go to sushi”

This design is barbaric and cruel; no social group acts this way. Were they to do so, the poor guy who hates Chinese must eat Chinese every meal simply because he is out numbered. Sadly, this is exactly how Democratic governments run (although it is far better than pre-Democratic governments: choosing burgers in the above example).

Why should we force this cruelty on people? If 20% of the people desperately want choice X instead of Y, and the other 80% of the people could go either way, then X is the right choice for the group.

Failing to express your opinion and then complaining about the choice others make is certainly a bad thing to do; you should vote if you have a strong opinion. But everyone should not vote on every issue.

People should actively refrain from voting on issues and elections they do not feel strongly about. Other people certainly do and their votes should count most.

Remember this in November: stay home.