It’s been a while since I have posted anything, but not for lack of having things to post about.  It’s simply that I have been working on a million projects at once as usual.  As you may know, NaNoWriMo comes every year in the month of November.  The challenge is to write a novel of at least 50,00 words in one month.  You have from the 1st of November until the 30th and you have to come out with a complete novel to win.  Despite the fact that it sounds crazy, it’s perfectly doable if you are dedicated to doing it.  In fact, I was way ahead on my word count all the way through the 15th.  By that point, however, I had also started a blog, joined a band, and started writing an ambitious Facebook application.

Before November, I was in a bit of a slump.  I don’t mean that things were going all that badly for me or anything.  I just wasn’t doing much.  I would go to work and then come back home and watch episodes of South Park on my computer or play a video game or read interesting articles on the Internet or some such thing.  Not all of it was completely useless, but I wasn’t really getting anything done.  On a whim, I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo on the 1st of November.  I woke up with a hangover and was groggily checking my email when I read the mail from them.  I had signed up the year before but didn’t even start, but they had my email address for that reason.  I just decided to give it a shot and started on the novel immediately.

I realized something.  It was sometimes difficult, but I cranked out over 2,000 words a day regardless.  It jump-started me into doing things again.  That’s when I realized that writing a novel wasn’t really what I wanted to be doing.  I took stock of what I really did want to be doing and decided to do it.  I started this blog because I realized that there are so many thing that I think of expounding upon every day and I don’t have anywhere to expound upon them.  I knew that some of the things would be useless drivel, but some of it might be something I would want to go back and read some day, and some of it might even be something that somebody else might want to read.  It’s all well and good to think things, but when you write them down, you end up exploring them much more fully in the process.  So I started it and found that having someplace to get out all the ideas and thoughts went even further toward pressing me forward to accomplish things again.

Even though I am not going to have a 50,000 word novel at the end of November, I am going to have a 30,000 word half a novel, a new music project, a Facebook application which is going to be really cool, and a blog.  All in all, I think it has been a good month.  I’d recommend NaNoWriMo to anyone.  Actually, you don’t really need NaNoWriMo.  Just pick any random thing and just decide on an arbitrary goal which is difficult yet possible and go at it.  You might be surprised what else comes of it even when you don’t succeed.

Name

My god, is the name of this site stupid!  Sorry, I just had to get that off my chest first and foremost.  What kind of dolt came up with the name ‘LiveMocha?’  It’s almost as completely sickening as the word ‘blog.’  First off the name has absolutely nothing to do with the service the site provides.  It’s just a combination of two buzz words that people who think they’re hip like to throw around these days: ‘live’ and ‘mocha.’  If the name of the site was ’steaming pile of turd,’ I would have more respect for them.  Ok, now that that’s clear, let’s move on.

Learning Approach

Their learning approach is taken right out of the Rosetta Stone playbook, but they do improve on it.  They have almost no grammar available to learn, so you basically have to go to another site and learn some grammar and how to read the letters, etc. before you’ll be able to start the beginners lesson at LiveMocha.  Once you have learned the grammar (from somewhere else) then LiveMocha is pretty useful, though.  I would call it Rosetta Stone II, except that it’s made by someone completely different.  The flash cards, reading, listening, and quiz sections employ the exact same methods.  The innovation comes in the writing and speaking sections.  That’s really the part of the site that gets me excited.  The community atmosphere is also a great addition.  I’m going to break down the bits and talk about each one in depth.

Listening

The listening sections are usually fine.  You do get instances not that uncommonly in which the speaker actually says something different than what is written down.  This can be quite confusing for people just starting out learning the language.  Once you get to a more advanced level, you can easily spot when this happens, but it’s still a little annoying.  The speakers generally have a clear speaking voice, although at times they don’t sound very professionally recorded.  The volume can be all over the place.  You might turn up your speakers to hear one slide then get blasted out of your seat by the next one.  Some of the recordings are so low that you can’t hear them very well even if the speakers are turned up full blast.  Then there’s the occasional slide which doesn’t have audio at all for some reason.  These problems are not rare exactly, but they do happen infrequently enough that they are not a show stopper.  All in all, the listening on the site is acceptable.

Reading

The reading sections are mostly good depending on what language you are studying.  If you are studying Korean, English, or German, they seem to be fine and I don’t remember seeing a mistake.  That is unless you call not matching the voice a mistake, but that was already mentioned above.  If you are studying Farsi, on the other hand, it is completely unusable.  What you see is not Farsi text at all but just a jumbled mess of nonsense using Farsi fonts.  Sometimes it’s just written backwards.  Every once in a while it’s correct.  Usually it is scrambled beyond all recognition.  I tried viewing it in various browsers(IE, Firefox, Opera) and various operating systems(Ubuntu Linux, Windows XP) and while they actually looked different on each one, on none of them did it look right.  Here is what I do when I study Farsi.  I skip to the end of the lesson as quickly as possible then add all the words as flashcards.  Then I go learn the words from the flashcards.  In the flashcards, the Farsi is written correctly.

Speaking and Writing

I’m going to discuss speaking and writing together because they work on the the same principle.  This aspect is the reason you should go sign up for LiveMocha.  In the speaking section, you record yourself reading a paragraph (at lower levels) or answering an open-ended question (at higher levels).  In the writing section you compose sentences using the concepts you learned or answer open-ended questions.  Then you submit these answers and they are graded by native speakers who are at the site to learn some other language.  And it works really well!  A lot of the people don’t give you a lot of specifics, but some do.  Most give you at least something you can work on improving.  I have had some really helpful critiques of my exercises by others at the site.  In exchange, of course, you should go grade other people’s submissions.  It’s fun, though.  You get points for doing it and everybody likes points!  The points aren’t useful for anything as far as I can tell, but points are an end in themselves right?  There is only one problem I can think of with these exercises.  They are not even offered for Korean language!  If you only want to study Korean, LiveMocha is not the place for you.  Sorry.

Social Aspect

Another great reason to use LiveMocha is the ability to chat with and interact with native speakers to help each other learn (unless you’re learning Korean in which case the chat application they use doesn’t allow inputting Korean characters so you’re out of luck).  There are various ways you can interact with others on the site.  You can grade other people’s submissions.  You can add people as friends so that you see when the other has submitted something.  This is a better way to get quality reviews of your exercises than depending on random people to happen along and put work into critiquing you.  You can also create and share flashcard sets.  The flashcard sets are a great ways to learn things outside of the lessons on the site.  And flashcards have the added benefit of the text displaying correctly with every language I’ve tried.  I have also taken advantage of the chat option quite often as well.  There is also voice chat if you’re that brave which I haven’t been.  I just tell people I don’t have a microphone if they ask.  But you really should use it because it can help your speaking skills.

Summary

In conclusion, I would say that LiveMocha is worth the effort to give it a shot.  I haven’t tried any of their paid services, but what you can get for free is good enough that I would recommend it.  On the downside, it has a lot of bugs.  I mentioned some of them above.  It needs a lot of work to function the way I expect a professional site to function.  Especially a site that is about learning language needs to try to be a lot more compatible with different technologies as there is no telling what kind of system someone in another culture is using.   I have some hope that it will iron out its kinks and it is already useful enough that you should head over there and start an account.  Unless you want to learn Korean.  In that case, go here.

I started smoking when I was about 16 years old.  That means that I have been smoking for about 16 years now.  I didn’t smoke compulsively at first, of course.  I can’t remember when that happened.  I guess it creeps up on you.  I would say it was probably around the age of 19 or 20.  Until three weeks ago, I don’t think a day has gone by since I was 19 in which I didn’t smoke a cigarette.  Before long, I was smoking a pack a day easy.  More if I was drinking or incredibly bored or something.  After all that, I stopped smoking compulsively in just one second.

Before I talk more about myself, though, I want to talk in general about quitting smoking.  Quitting smoking is easy.  Quitting smoking completely involves only one easy step.  Don’t light the end of a cigarette and then put your mouth on the other end and suck the smoke into your lungs. That’s the secret to quitting smoking.  That’s it.

If it’s that easy, you may ask, why is there a multi-billion dollar industry built around helping people do it?  There are books published.  There are articles written.  There is therapy for it.  There are hypnotists and voodoo parctitioners to help you quit.  There are numerous pharmacological products to aid you.  Why does all this exist if quitting smoking is that easy?  The answer is simple.  People want you to believe it is hard to quit smoking.  This isn’t some crazy conspiracy theory or anything.  There’s no organized conspiracy to make people believe this, but there are a lot of people who have something to gain by people believing it.

For starters, there are all the people making all that money off of aids to quit smoking.  They want you to believe it because if you quit smoking without them, they don’t get your money.  What about anti-smoking nazis?  They want you to believe it because if you’re not a helpless victim trapped by addiction, then they have to admit that they’re just persecuting people who have made their own choices.  What about smokers?  Oh they really want to believe it because then they can shirk all personal responsibility and blame someone or something else for their choice.  There are a lot of people who aren’t all working together or even have similar goals but all want you to believe that quitting smoking is hard.

Let’s examine the truth.  Nicotine is the easiest addictive drug to quit.  Why is that? Unlike other drugs like cocaine or heroin, nicotine induces a persistent amplification in the brain’s sensitivity to rewarding stimuli.  Because of this, it has incredibly mild withdrawal effects.  What? Some idiot told you that it’s more addictive than cocaine or heroin?  People like to spout this and it is based on a silly redefinition of the word ‘addiction’ which came about in the 80’s and basically puts everything that’s enjoyable into that category.  Why don’t you go get hooked on heroin then come try to make that argument after you’ve tried to quit.  Yeah, that’s what I thought.

And these quit-smoking aids that people are making so much dough off of?  Completely worthless.  People who try to quit smoking have around a 11-12% success rate.  No matter what method they use or if they use no method at all, it’s about 11-12%.  Get this into your head right now.  Stop smoking aids are as credible as astrology and psychic readings.  And the plethora of materials related to quitting smoking exists for the same reason as the plethora of material having to do with astrology and psychics does.  It’s profitable.

If you want to quit smoking, it’s really easy to do.  Why is the success rate only 11% if it’s so easy, you ask?  Because that is the success rate for people who try to quit smoking.  If you want to quit smoking, don’t try to quit smoking.  Quit fucking smoking!  Don’t light a cigarette.  When you try to do something, you have already built in the possibility of failure.  Many things in life are beyond our control and failure is something we have to deal with.  Writing a best-selling novel, for instance, naturally has a high possibility of failure.  When it comes to quitting smoking, however, it is completely up to you.  There is no possibility of failure unless you build it in yourself.  Do you really want to quit smoking?  Honestly, ask yourself that.  Do you really want to quit smoking?  If you do, then I’ll help you out.  I don’t know if I mentioned that I am a member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, but I am and so I am going to perform some magic for you.  I will turn you into a nonsmoker, but only if you really want to become one.  Are you ready? *poof*!  You are a nonsmoker.  Don’t smoke another cigarette as long as you live.  Seriously, just don’t.  You don’t have to anymore because you’re a nonsmoker.  You can thank me later.

Now, the next thing I want to make clear here is that I did not quit smoking.  It was never my intention to do so.  I love smoking.  I made a decision years ago to start smoking, and I have never regretted it.  What I did want to change, however, is how much I smoked.  Smoking was affecting my quality of life.  My energy levels, my stamina, breathing, and overall well-being was being adversely affected by how much I smoked.  The health detriments of smoking are very real.  They are way overblown by the anti-smoking nazis, but it is clearly the case the smoking is not healthy.  Therefore, I wanted to cut down on my smoking considerably to even out the risk/reward ratio.

Therefore, I devised a revolutionary plan to cut down on smoking.  I decided to… are you ready for it?  I decided to only smoke when I wanted to.

Yep, that’s what I did.  I decided it one night as I was going to sleep and I implemented it first thing the next day.  I walked out the door to work without my pack of cigarettes which, up until that point, had become as mandatory as my wallet and cell phone whenever I left the house.  I didn’t smoke a cigarette on the way to work.  I didn’t take any cigarette breaks.  I didn’t smoke a cigarette after lunch, and I didn’t smoke when I got home.  Actually, it was easy during the day to not smoke, but harder at home.  Boredom and repetition made me want to reach for a cigarette while I sat at my computer, but I just had to think about it for a second to realize that I didn’t really want to smoke the cigarette.  I was just doing it out of habit or to ease a nicotine craving.  I didn’t smoke a single cigarette Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, and it wasn’t difficult because I knew that if I ever wanted a cigarette, I could smoke one.  The time when I really wanted a cigarette just never came.

On Friday, it came.  I got into a big fight with my stupid boss (not the way everybody’s boss is stupid; she really is an embecile, but that’s another post) and stormed out of the office.  I really wanted a cigarette so I bought a pack and smoked two in a row.  Then I came back in and finished work.  That night, I went out with my friends.  I drank some alcohol which made me want to smoke.  So I did!  You know what?  The next morning, I woke up and didn’t light up a cigarette.  That’s when I knew that I had succeeded in quitting smoking compulsively.  I had smoked cigarettes and it did not throw me back into my old habits.  I didn’t feel guilty about it because I knew that I had wanted to smoke those cigarettes and that those were the kinds of situations that really made me fall in love with smoking to begin with.  Smoking had become an old nagging wife, and now she’s a young love again.  Every time I decide to smoke (which is very rarely these days) it’s because I want to, not because I am obligated to by my habits, and it feels great.

I smoke less than a pack a week these days.  During the week, I usually don’t smoke at all.  On the weekends, I smoke a lot less than I used to.  I feel great already and I can feel my health coming back every day.  I recommend this to every smoker, and I want to give you some tips to help you out.

• The first tip is much like the tip I gave to the non-smoker wannabes a minute ago.  It’s not hard.  You don’t have to prepare for it or set a date for it.  Just decide to do it right now.
• Don’t smoke at all for at least 3 days.  This is to help get you out of the daily routine of smoking so you can more easily tell the difference between feeling an urge to smoke and actually wanting to smoke.
• If you think you want to smoke, think about whether or not you really do for a couple minutes.  You may find that you really didn’t want to smoke after all.
• Whenever you deny yourself a cigarette, remind yourself that you have not quit smoking and that you will eventually smoke a cigarette just not right now.

Don’t you remember how great life was when you were a social smoker?  Let’s reclaim that.  Let’s make smoking work for us, not the other way around!

One of the things I learned was ‘link to a lot of other people’s blogs.’  In my first blog post, you may notice that I was goofing around and putting links to everyone and their mother just for the fun of it.  That strategy really paid off, and got me my first commenting visitor!  I went and checked out his blog and, as it turns out, it’s actually somewhat interesting.  It’s still a blog and has things like his perspective class list sitting in there for no reason among the more interesting things, but it’s not bad for being a blog and I added it to my links section.  Thus the other thing I learned was ‘blogs can be somewhat interesting.’  This particular person posts a lot of stuff on the free will vs. determinism debate.  Specifically he has a lot of stuff from the biological realm.  Just check it all out for yourself here.

Maybe everything has a cause and maybe it doesn’t.  It certainly seems like everything has a cause when we just look at the world using our ‘common sense.’  However, we know very well by now that common sense is often wrong.  There are good arguments on both sides as to whether everything in the universe has a cause or not.  We, as humans, can’t imagine an uncaused event.  It is beyond our capabilities to imagine something happening that was not caused by something else.  However, we know for sure that at least some things are true of which humans cannot conceive.  For example, time either had a beginning or it did not.  Humans can neither conceive of infinity or of time having a beginning or end.  Yet, one of those things has to be true, right?

The big question that I’m leading to here, though, is how this affects free will.  What I would like to put out there is simply this:  The answer to the question as to whether everything is caused has absolutely nothing to do with the free will question.  That’s right.  They are not related in the slightest.  It doesn’t matter if every single part of your brain as well as every piece of energy that will ever drive it is completely caused and predictable if we just knew how to do the calculations, it would not matter.

We have free will.

That’s the thing too many people forget.  We have free will.  That isn’t really something that can be debated.  We have invented this problem of whether free will exists where no problem actually is.  It has arisen because we humans keep looking into the past at past choices and thinking about ‘what if’ we had done something differently.  Then we wonder if it was even possible to have done something differently.  Since we can’t go into the past to test whether it’s possible, there’s no way of knowing with certainty, right?  Even if we do go back in time, we have to have the exact same conditions present as the first time, so we can’t remember that we’re conducting the experiment.  Since we don’t know that we’re conducting the experiment, we might choose the same choice again (in fact are likely to since we chose it the first time) and so there is just no way to know if we ever really have the ability to make our own choices.  Well, my friends, we have just unwittingly invented the free-will vs. determinism debate.

What was the one thing that we forgot while we got muddled down in thought about the past here?  We forgot the simple fact that we have free will.  We both know that we can make our own decisions and that when we make those decisions it is actually us deciding.

Think I’m oversimplifying things?  Well, I’ll prove right now that you have free will.  We don’t even need to go into the past.  We’ll do it right now.  Put something in front of you.  It can be anything but should be something that is light enough to pick up.  Set it down in front of you right now.  Don’t do anything yet, but I want you to decide whether or not you are going to pick that object up when I say ‘go.’  Think really hard about this decision.  Make sure it’s firm in your mind.  I want you to decide right here in now what is going to happen when I say ‘go.’  You will either pick the object up or not. Whatever you decided, make it happen when the time comes. Have you decided? Are you ready?

GO!

As long as you did that in earnest, I guarantee that you did what you had previously decided to do.  There.  You have free will.  It really is that simple.  If the exact same state of the universe occurred again, would you pick it up that time?  Who knows?  Who cares?  The fact is that this thing that exists in the world that you call ‘me’ decided on which action to take and took that action.  That’s free will.

A lot of the difficulty is that people insist on coming at the problem backwards.  It’s like hitting your hand with a hammer and  then trying to figure out if your hand hurts by studying the speed at which the hammer came down, the weight of the hammerhead, etc.  You know damn well your hand hurts!  And you know damn well that you have free will.

The real question then is not if we have free will.  It’s a question of how we can have free will, especially if determinism is true.  This is a fairly complex explanation and I actually wrote my whole thesis on this area back in college, but I’ll touch on it briefly below.

Free will exists in a different context than determinism.  Not to delve too far into Descartes here, but he famously wrote the phrase ‘cogito ergo sum.’  Often translated as “I think therefore I am,” what he was actually saying here is that he can know that he exists because he is the one doing the wondering about whether he exists.  Whatever it is wondering about whether it exists, Descartes calls “I.”  It is not a big leap from there to go on and prove that at least one thing that is not me exists.  I experience input from things that I do not recognize as being myself, and I call those things “not I” (or simply “other stuff”).  Proving that anything besides those two things exist, however, is pretty hard and so Descartes resorts to some religious stuff that we’ll not get into.  The point is, there is a distinction you can easily draw between you and other stuff.  The other stuff may be only one thing or it may be billions of things, but it is not you.

This is important here because these two things are really just separate contexts.  You can never talk about something out of its context or it doesn’t make sense.  Free will belongs to the context of YOU.  Determinism belongs to the context of OTHER STUFF.  This is true even if YOU are completely caused by OTHER STUFF (for example, the brain causes the mind).  Free will and determinism do not even exist in the same universe of discourse. They were never given the opportunity to be incompatible.

You have free will.

Whew, well this post was far too long.  I’m off to bed.  Damn, blogs take a lot of time…

Most of them boil down to this: Can God create a rock that is too heavy for God to lift?

That seems on its face to completely disprove omnipotence. The answer to the question has to be yes or no. If it’s yes, then God would not be able to lift the rock and would therefore not be omnipotent. If it is no, he would not be able to create the rock and would therefore not be omnipotent. Airtight argument right? However, I’m actually going to disprove that argument.

The first thing I need to do is address the point of logical impossibility. For example, can God create a round square? The answer to this question clearly seems to have to be no. This, however, unlike the above argument, is not very compelling evidence at all against God’s omnipotence. Despite the fact that the two look very similar on the face, they are, in fact, very different.

Our first argument (about the rock) talks about something that is a contingent truth. God’s ability to lift a rock is contingent (unless you accept St. Anselm’s argument which brings with it baggage you probably don’t want). A square not being round is a necessary truth. It is defined in the definition of the square that it is not round (in Euclidean geometry).

Therefore, when you ask the first question, you are referring to a possibility which really exists, the possibility that someone or something (God) could lift someone or something else (a rock). When you ask the second question, you are just speaking gibberish. The term “round square” doesn’t actually refer to anything. It is akin to asking “Can God create a guettedoojazzle?” The answer to that question, therefore, is not “no,” but rather “what the hell are you talking about?”

God cannot create logically impossible things because logically impossible things are not really things at all but merely silly combinations of words.

The question I really came here to talk about though was that as to whether God can create a rock that he can’t lift. I contend that he could create such a rock, and that his ability to do so does not disprove his omnipotence.

Omnipotence is the ability to do anything. However, it is not by definition a permanent ability. Someone could conceivably have omnipotence at one point and then cease to have it. That means that God, if omnipotent right now, could create the rock that he can’t lift. After creating it, however, he would cease to be omnipotent as there would be one thing that he could not do.

Now, I know what some of you Christians are thinking. You’re thinking that you don’t believe in a God that could, at some point, cease to be omnipotent. You believe in a God that is, and always will be, omnipotent. Well, this is not that difficult of a problem to solve, actually.

If God does not want to stop being omnipotent, he will never stop being omnipotent. That’s because his omnipotence, will allow him the ability to stop anything from happening that would take away his omnipotence. If this were true, there could be only one being in the world that was omnipotent. Multiple omnipotent beings would screw it up because what if one of them wanted to take away the omnipotence of the other and the other didn’t want that… But the good news is that, if you’re Christian, you probably already believe that God is the only omnipotent being, so we don’t have a problem.

In order to accept this explanation, you would also have to believe that God is fundamentally the type of guy who wants to be omnipotent forever. This doesn’t seem that incompatible with Christian beliefs, either, so it shouldn’t cause too much problem. It might make him seem a little bit like a megalomaniac, but he kind of is anyway what with creating an entire world full of people who’s sole purpose is to worship him.  He would also have to be omniscient as well so that he doesn’t accidentally take away his omnipotence, but Christians also already believe this so, once again, not a problem.

So, there you have it, folks. It is entirely possible for God to be omnipotent (if there were a God).

Does anyone really like listening to feminist poetry?  It’s all whiny drivel by people who don’t care a bit about quality because they say they are just writing for themselves but then feel compelled to share it with other people.  There is nothing that can make you want to kill yourself more than a feminist poetry reading.  Don’t get me wrong or anything.  I’m not saying poetry by women is all bad.  I’m just saying that when it’s good, it’s just called poetry.  If somebody calls what they do ‘feminist poetry‘ it is, by definition, bad.

Anyway, where was I?  Oh yes, blogs…  I really hate them and anyone who has anything to do with them.  Don’t these fat lazy slobs have anything better to do with their lives than sit and write crap nobody worth caring about wants to read and then posting it on the Internet?  Yes,l I realize that I am included since I am sitting here writing a blog.  I could be laying over there next to my girlfriend.  I told her I would come to bed like 2 hours ago when she begged me to.  I said that I just had to finish writing another thousand words or so on my NaNoWriMo novel and then I’d be straight to bed.  Well, those words are written and, for some reason, I decided to go make a blog instead of coming to bed which is what I should have done in the first place.

Oh, and you know what else I hate about blogs?  Every fucking body has one.  Look at the name I had to choose for my user name.  Dispeopler!  You know how I chose it?  It was easy.  It was the only fucking word left in the English language that wasn’t already taken by somebody else.  I used the random word generator and just kept generating new words and trying them as user names until one of them wasn’t taken.  What the hell is a ‘dispeopler’ anyway?  I looked it up.  It is something that dispopulates.  What the hell does that mean?  My user name is a word so obscure that the definition itself is too obscure to understand.

Well, anyway, welcome to my blog.  I’m going to try to post something here every day for no good reason when I should be doing other more productive things.  Actually, I’m imagining I’ll mainly post from work, so maybe I won’t have any more productive things to do.  I don’t know what the blog is going to be about.  I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.  I’m excited to find out though.  I imagine it will probably have at least something to do with Korea because I live here, music because I’m a musician and music fan, probably writing, philosophy, doubtless some reviews of various things. There’ll probably end up being stuff about software development and learning languages here as well eventually if it keeps going.

Alright well, that’s it, then.  My first blog post is now over.