On Expletives and Political Protest

There was a time in my life, more or less in my mid-teens, where I had gotten into the habit of including an expletive in just about every sentence I spoke. I did this partly because my friends were doing it, but largely because like so many teens I had come to believe that everything I said was so important that it needed a four letter word to emphasis just how important it was.

Like many, I eventually realized that if you emphasize everything, you are really emphasizing nothing. And further I came to understand that if you use an expletive in every sentence, there is no way to convey that extra level of emotion or importance when you need to; when you label everything with a superlative or an expletive, then there is no way to convey true importance using words because you have rendered every word you might use impotent.

I think most people understand this, with regards to their personal lives and day to day conversations, but a surprising number of people seem not to understand this in terms of expressing themselves politically.

If there is a politician or political party in power, at any level of government, whose political views are very different than yours then he, she or they are going to make a lot of decisions that you won't like. If you go on public rants about said politician over every issue, and frequently cite the superlatives of political discussion (comparisons to dictators, your country's way of life being destroyed, calls for extreme measures to remove said politician, etc) then what do you do when there is an issue that is even more important than all the other ones?

How can you get the attention of your ambivalent friends and neighbors, when they long ago began tuning you out because you scream bloody murder over everything? How can you tell a politician that this decision really is going too far, when you've already told them that dozens of other decisions they've made have gone too far? How much harder do these problems become when you are not a lone voice who has decried every decision, but one of thousands? How numb will you collectively have made the politician and the public to criticism?

The answer to this is the same for a politically minded person as it is for the swearing teenager. When you have painted yourself into a corner where words can no longer have the meaning you need them to, then your only choice is to take action. If this really is the law that's going to destroy the country, then your only choice is to actually do something about it; there are a lot of ways one can protest, and if a law really is the end of everything, then it shouldn't be hard to find others who will protest with you.

Real Men Memes

Since before the dawn of history men have been telling other men (and sometimes women have been telling men) what REAL MEN do. Of course, I want to be a REAL MAN (what man doesn't), so I thought I'd take a look online and find out what I am doing right, and what I have to change...

Um, OK. That's seems like a easy one. I should hope we
all passed it.

Seems like another no brainer. Got to wonder though
if this actually has any impact of those they are trying
to reach.

I'm still good.

Does my little beard count?

But what happened to the scarf?

I do love curvy women, but I have nothing
against ones who aren't. Do I still get the point?

Like how much love do you need?
Can I just love his message of love?

Do I have to dress like that though?

Black? What if my taste buds aren't dead?

OK. I admit it, I'm not a man.
Is there anything else I could do?

Back to being a real man.
And apparently sexy.

W T F ?

Like how much are we talking? I definitely put Shatner
to shame, but that isn't saying much. Wait a minute,
is this saying Kirk isn't a real man?

So, another fail.

That seems to really limit the number of real men.

I'm going down fast.

What if I don't have a daughter?

I have to say, I never felt especially
masculine while changing diapers.

I would say that the notion of a
"most beautiful girl in the world" is a fallacy. 

Geez Harry Potter fans, isn't this setting the bar low?

Do I get bonus points for eating LOTS of chocolate?

Forget the message for a minute, and realize that whomever
made this thought that beautiful picture of Ash was representative
of this idea.

This defies words.

Yum.

I don't think the maker of this got the subtext of the cartoon.

What if they aren't Scottish?

So being a programmer is just like being Chuck Norris?

Does this even make sense?

Real men are fictional? Huh?

This is probably what most of you were expecting in this post;
hopefully it seems a little more silly to you now.

Now, that makes sense.

On Birthday Wishes

I had a birthday just recently, a fact that will probably leave a couple of you wondering why Facebook didn't inform you of this.

Have you ever found a public domain picture, only to
wonder who is in it, and how they feel about the whole
world having permission to use it?

The first four birthdays I celebrated as a member of Facebook (2009-2012) I had my birthday set to hidden. This was a purposeful choice based off of privacy fears; that is to say you can have your identity stolen by a person who has nothing more than your name and birthday.

But although I felt like I was taking a stand on privacy, it seemed that no else I knew, including many very intelligent people, were similarly blocking their birthday. Every year I would watch friends get scores of birthday wishes, but then I would get just one from my wife and a couple more from people who saw my wife's post. Even though it was an absurd thought to have, it made me feel pretty worthless to seem to have only one person in the world who cared that it was my birthday.

Reluctantly, for my 2013 birthday, I decided to make my birthday public during March. I got a lot of birthday wishes on the big day, and for that day I felt really great; that day was one of the best things about an otherwise bad year.

But when the day was over I realized something, that now I would be socially obligated (or at least I would feel socially obligated) to send birthday greetings to others when their birthdays came up. In all the years I was hiding my birthday I didn't feel bad at all that I almost never wished anyone else a happy birthday; I might wish three or four people a year happy birthday and that would be it, and I quite liked it that way.

Unfortunately, old habits die hard, and I quickly fell back into my old ways of not posting birthday wishes to other people. So I decided that for 2014 I would go back to keeping my birthday private, lest I be an even worse person for not wishing others happy birthday.

Strangely, I don't feel so lonely this year, and I am actually quite happy that no one except Margaret wished me a happy birthday (also, please note I just said I am happy that no one wished me a happy birthday before you get any ideas about wishing a belated one).

Actually, in many ways I wish my birthday had passed by completely unobserved; its not that I dread getting older, its just that feel little need to celebrate it.

9 Tips For Interfaith Couples

There is a book due out later this year called In Faith and In Doubt  which will be about marriages where one partner is religious and the other not. A couple of different places online have already featured a list that is supposedly in the book about the 9 things the author feels a couple in such a marriage needs to do; I thought it would be interesting to put our marriage up against that list.



#1. Never try to convert or de-convert your partner. 

I don't think either of us has ever tried to do this to the other, though we have both been guilty of making comments that amounted to "my life would be easier if you would just believe what I believe".




#2. Talk about your differences of belief as early as possible in the relationship.

We are a huge failure at this one, and by we, I mean me.

I suppose I can claim some innocence with regards to not telling Margaret I was an atheist early in the relationship because even though its probably fair to say I already was one when we met, I hadn't really figured that out for myself yet; its was only really after admitting to myself that I don't believe in God that I was able to look back at my life and see that going from a believer to non-believer was a 25 year fight.

But I can't claim any innocence on my lack of interest in learning about Margaret's faith. I had always assumed that any reasonable sounding Christian I met believed the same sort of things I had believed when I was an Anglican; the idea that other faiths could be very different never occurred to me. And since coming to realize that LDS believe some very different things than Anglicans I have wanted to talk about it even less because it has become a very touchy subject between us.

A good example of something Mormons
believe in that Anglicans don't.

#3. Work out agreements for all shared practices, including churchgoing, parenting, and family religious identity, by defining your negotiables and non-negotiables. 

We have definitely failed at this, and I think its fair to say that I am largely to blame for the failure.






#4. Focus on shared values more than different beliefs.

Here is something which we excel at. Margaret and I have a lot of shared values, from the very little to the very big. And the things we don't agree on by and large are things that don't affect us very much.

Actually, as much as I enjoy talking with my wife about a wide array of subjects, it would be kind of embarrassing if somebody were to overhear us, because there are no shortage of times when we have conversations where our views are so in line that we are just endlessly agreeing with each other.





#5. Make personal respect non-negotiable, even as you question and challenge each other’s ideas.

I think its probably fair to say that a big part of the reason I don't like to challenge Margaret's ideas on subjects that are either directly or peripherally tied to religion is precisely because I don't know how to do it in a way that I wouldn't fear being disrespectful. (even in writing this post I am terrified that I am being disrespectful)

I don't know how much of an improvement silence is over disrespect, but I hope it is at least a little bit of one.




#6. Engage in and learn about each other’s worldviews — and that must be a two-way street.

As this point has a lot of overlap with previous ones I feel like I am repeating myself. We have definitely failed at this, and I blame myself. I am uncomfortable discussing anything of real consequence with other people, especially those I care about, when we are in disagreement, both because I fear offending them and because my social anxiety tends to kick in during these types of conversations and I find myself struggling to follow the conversation, much less properly express my point of view.





#7. Remember that the opinions of believers are not always the same as the doctrines of their churches, just as believers must remember that the opinions of nonbelievers are not always the same as those of prominent atheists.

The fact that I came to know Margaret very well before I had much of an understanding about her church has meant that there has been little chance of my making wrong assumptions about her beliefs based on her faith; if anything I have at times made wrong assumptions about her church based on her beliefs.

The opposite is also true, Margaret and I had been married several years before I realized that I was an atheist so I don't think she has ever assumed the views of Dawkins, Hitchens or others to be mine (if she's even heard them at all).

It's a level of strange only rivaled by Ricky and the Muppets
 somehow making an unfunny movie together.

#8. Raise children with the freedom to choose their own religious or nonreligious identity. Expose them to many traditions, beliefs, and practices.

We have agreed that Robbie should be able to choose for himself, though when that choice should be made and what should happen in the years before it is made has not always been clear or easy for us.

But as for the second half of this, I have trouble with it and always have. Atheism isn't a belief, its a lack of beliefs (or as Bill Maher once said "Not only is atheism not my religion, its not even my hobby"), and I don't know how to explain to Robbie why I don't believe in God without sounding like I am saying "that thing your mother believes in, is completely wrong"; I don't know how to explain my position without attacking his mother's position, and as it would be wrong to do that for many reasons, I have never told Robbie anything about my thoughts on religion beyond simply "I don't believe in God".

If I feel I cannot tell Robbie why I think theistic beliefs are wrong, why would I be accepting of people who are strangers to me telling him that I am wrong? I can accept his mother teaching him about God because she is his mother, and he can and should learn about her beliefs.

But, of course, part of Margaret's beliefs include that children should be involved in a number of programs to teach them about God and such. For me it is a very difficult thing to agree to some stranger teaching him, especially because, just as #7 noted, people of the same faith can have very different beliefs. I just don't see any upside to having an adult who is not one of his parents being put in an authority position over him to teach him lessons of faith.

However, there is something much more deep and personal about why I am hesitant to subject Robbie to religious indoctrination at a young age. My experience, and the experience of most atheists who were born to religious parents, is that the journey from being a person of faith to one without faith is a very long and painful one.

If I knew that if Robbie joined the LDS church and could spend his whole life in it being happy and fulfilled, then I would be happy for him to go. If in the near future he decides to go on his own, I will be OK with that too. But I could not live with myself if I was complicit in forcing him to go as a young child, only to have him go through the struggles I went through coming to term with his own lack of faith.

I wouldn't know what to do if at 35 years old Robbie came up to me and asked why I made him go to church when I knew from first hand experience how painful deconverting can be.




#9. Support and protect each other from mistreatment or disrespect, especially by those who share your worldview, including extended family.

If this statement were read very broadly, I could come up with instances where each of us failed the other, but I am quite certain that the author's intention was to mean protect your partner from those of your faith (or lack of) disrespecting your partner because of his/her faith (or lack of).

I hope I would pass this test, but I have never been put to it. Quite simply, I have never felt inclined to join an atheist group, nor have I felt the need to announce my atheism to those few people I have known who are atheists; this has never come up because there has never been any opportunity for it to come up.

On the other hand, Margaret has had to deal with this, and she has been simply amazing every time. When members of her church have been pushy about converting me, she has asked them to leave and not come back. When a member of her church tried to pressure her into putting a picture of Jesus as the centre piece of our family room, she felt no shame in telling said women that we would not be taking the suggestion because it would not be in line with the beliefs of Margaret's husband . Simply put my wife is awesome, and that more than anything is why our marriage works.

5 Groups I Wish I Could Friend on Facebook

We've all seen the posts where people declare they are trimming their list of Facebook friends. Some are a brief message with little information other than the fact it will or has happened ("I'm cutting back my friends list; if you can read this you survived the cut.") while other are long essays on who will be removed.

I've never done a Facebook purge, nor have I ever felt the inclination to do so. I'm not sure why it is a somewhat common thing for others, but not for me; it may be that I have been a little pickier in who I have friended (the only friends I have that I've never met in person are radio DJs I like, and there are many people Facebook thinks I should be friends with that I am not because I did not get along with them in real life); it may be that my friends list has never grown long enough to warrant such a purge (my friends list has been hovering between 130 and 140 pretty much since I left NAIT three years ago); or it could be that the rare time a friend is posting things I don't like I am completely satisfied with just blocking their content from my feed (in the six years I have been on Facebook I have unfriended one person).

No, I don't have people I wish to unload to my virtual life, but what I do have is a long list of people I wish I could add to it, such as:


1. My High School Gaming Friends

From the moment I first signed up for Facebook there has been no group I wanted to friend more than this, and no group that I have struggled more to find. I did find Alan not long after I joined and Quinn found me fairly recently, but other than those two (and two others who only very occasionally gamed, and a third who I was good friends with in high school but did not get along so well in university) I have really struggled to find any one.

All in all that is probably 75% of my friends I had as a child who either have no presence of Facebook or are so well hidden that I have never been able to find them. Compared to the percentage of the general population my age that have Facebook accounts, it an anomaly.

At least I'll always have you . . .

2. Family

My father died when I three, and the next year my mother decided that his family should have nothing to do with me. Four years later my mother had a fight with her mother, and I would never see anyone from my mother's family for the rest of my childhood.

Growing up the only child of a single mother with no extended family in my life the value I place on family has always been significantly lower than most other people do. That being said, I had long hoped that Facebook could marginally increase the presence that family has in my life - for the most part it hasn't.

I am Facebook friends with a few of the Dyers (relatives of my mom's third husband) and a few of my in-laws, but that's about it.

Despite many attempts, I have yet to track down a single cousin, aunt or uncle of mine (from either side of my family) on Facebook. Admittedly, I only have a small number of names to go off of, but I've always assumed that as soon as I find one, others would follow.

With the Dyers I have had good luck with those close to my age, but not so good luck with those much older or younger than me; mostly this is an issue of not being on Facebook, though some have chosen to reject friend requests from me.

When I first got on Facebook I made a conscious choice to not friend any in-laws I didn't already know well until I could track down some of my own family. Months have turned into years, and at this point it would just seem odd sending friend requests to my wife's nieces and nephews that probably don't even remember me; though I probably should get on friending my brother and sister in-laws that joined Facebook in the last couple years.



3. LRPS

I was part of the Live Role Playing Society for three years in the mid-90s. With one exception (which I will mention in a minute), the issue I have had with LRPS friends is very different than with my family and gaming friends. First of all, I have lots of friends on Facebook that I knew through LRPS - after call centre co-workers and former classmates they are the biggest group represented in my friends list. Second of all, I have never really gone looking on Facebook for people I knew through LRPS - everyone of them on my friend list is there because Facebook suggested I friend them and I thought "yeah, that's a good idea".

And yet, I hold an angst towards my lack of LRPS friends. This can be simply explained as, almost every denied friend request I have ever had was from a LRPS member. Why have so many LRPS members turned me down? I don't know for sure. My best guess is just that I remember them better than they remember me. I was a quiet guy who was only part of that group for a fraction of its existence, so in all likelihood many of the long term members don't have a clue who I am when I send them a request.

Now as for that exception. Todd was my roommate while I was in university, and when I signed up for Facebook I had really hoped I could use it to get back in touch with him. Still, it doesn't shock me he's not on it (last I checked), he was never much of a computers guy, and probably still isn't.



4. Co-Workers and Classmates

I group these two together because the situation is much the same. I have been pretty efficient at friending both of these groups during my time on Facebook; each of them represent a sizable fraction of my friends. Yet, in each group there have been a lot of people that I wish I had on my friends list that I do not. But, what makes the missing friends from these groups so different is that as time passes I care less that they aren't there.

When I joined Facebook it had been just 4 years since I had left Convergys and just 1 since I had left Dell; I've now been on Facebook for 6 years. When I was friending my NAIT classmates I was in class with them; next month it will be 3 years since I've seen most of them.

I don't even remember the names of most of the co-workers and classmates I used to wish I could track down, much less why I enjoyed their company.

Of course, because I have so many co-workers on my friends list, and because those call centres were so huge, Facebook loves suggesting employees from Convergys and Dell for me to add. But the ones it seems to suggest aren't even the ones I used to want to add, they are all either strangers or people I didn't like when I worked with them.



5. Outliers

There are a few people who aren't really part of some easy to point to group that I wish I could find and friend - a couple of kids I knew when I was really young, a couple more I knew when I was somewhat older, a guy I played board games with many years ago, a girl who helped me out when I had nowhere to stay and so on.

From time to time I look for some of them, but always fail to find them.

In many ways being unable to find people you want to find is the most frustrating thing that can happen to you with Facebook, after all, connecting with others is the very purpose of social media.

My Successful Interviews

Between December 2012 and February 2014 I had five different full time jobs. As I've only actually been an Engineering Technologist for a little under 3 years, towards the end of that stretch I was beginning to question whether I had made the right choice when I left my IT career behind in August of 2009.

Of course, going back was never really an option - I am too heavily invested in my new career, and I am too far out of touch with the changes that have happened in IT. But even if I could change all that I still wouldn't go back to my previous career because of one incredibly huge factor - interviews.

Now I realize that somewhere in the neighborhood of everybody hates interviews. I like to think that I hate them even more than most being that I pretty much hate talking to people in nearly all circumstances, but even if I don't have a privileged level of interview hate, for much of my life they were my bane.

In all the years I was in IT and also in all the years before I was in IT I had a horrible conversion rate of interviews to jobs. I didn't track my employment searches back then the way I do now, so I can't say with certainty that my numbers for that time aren't tainted by bias, but I feel pretty sure that from the moment I actually started working for a living till when I decided to go to NAIT I averaged about one job for every ten interviews.

There were some stretches where I did somewhat better, and others where I did far worse, but overall I always seemed to be hovering around that 10% mark.

Since I graduated from NAIT and have been applying for Mech Tech jobs, I have been averaging one job for every three interviews. In fact, in that stretch of fifteen months where I was so frequently unemployed I was doing slightly better than one in three.

Why was there such a drastic improvement? Obviously there are a lot of factors that are difficult to measure, such as:

• I am seeking higher level positions than I used to. 
• The candidate pool in the jobs I apply to now is generally smaller than it was for other jobs I applied to before. 
• HR trends vary both over time and by industry.
• I am better educated in my current field than any previous one I worked in.

But I am going to say that I think these are not the primary issue; the primary issue is that there is one type of question which was unavoidable in the interviews I used to do, and yet has almost never comes up any more. That question, which was the bane of my existence for so many years goes like this

"Tell me about a time when x happened and how you dealt with it."

I am not much of an oral storyteller, and I tend to forget most of the mundane things that happen in my life; actually, I think part of how I was able to survive for so long in call centres is that my brain would so quickly purge the details of these meaningless calls. I can remember a number of calls from my first couple years on the phones when everything was fresh and new, but I couldn't tell you about a single call I took in the last five years I was on the phone; and most of those forgotten calls were forgotten before I started my next shift.

So interviewers would ask me to remember a story, which I couldn't, and I'm an even worse liar than I am a storyteller (so there was no point in trying to BS them). So I would often spend a long time trying to come up with an answer that would be very underwhelming. In one particularly bad interview there were multiple times I sat in silence for two or three minutes trying to come up with an answer before admitting "I don't have an answer for that."

I don't know if its because of the level of the positions I am applying for or if its because the positions usually are not ones with a lot of customer contact, but only twice in all the interviews I have done for Mech Tech positions has that question ever come up, and both times it was "Tell me about a time when you had a problem with a co-worker and how you dealt with it."

So that, in a nutshell is why I think I am getting more jobs now. But even with the success I have found, I still hate them and will happily quote to anyone who cares to listen studies that have shown that interviewing is pretty much the worst way possible of determining the best candidate.

3 Common Myths About π

I am something of a hipster about pi; I loved it long before the Internet turned it into the celebrity number and hate some of the things that people do with it now days (Pi day, really? How can you even call yourself a pi lover if you think 3.14 is a good approximation? )

But the thing that grinds my gears more than anything is that love of pi doesn't go hand in hand with truth about pi. People want to get some good "I-am-a-nerd" feeling without taking the time to actually learn anything about the subject they claim to be nerding out about.

Nowhere is this more seen than the many memes that wanna be nerds spread about pi.

Myth #1 That Pi is a "Natural Number"

If you don't see anything wrong with this,
you credibility as a math nerd is suspect.

I have been seeing memes like this a lot lately and just want to smack the people who make them.

Sure you could argue that this is using the colloquial definition of natural and not the mathematical one, but it would be about as appropriate to do so as using the colloquial definition of theory in the midst of a discussion of the validity of evolution.

In mathematics the natural numbers are those used for counting.

 

Myth #2 That Pi Contains Everything Imaginable

If you don't see anything wrong with this,
you definitely aren't a math nerd.

This is the meme that made me hate IFLS. I spent a very long time trying explain to people there why this is a complete falsehood, but since IFLS (and the Internet in general really) are less interested in what is true and more interested in making science something that a person can geek-out over, I was shouted down.

More that anything this falsehood is based on a misunderstandings of what it means for something to be infinite, and what it means for a number to be irrational (i.e. an infinite non-repeating decimal).

Rather than try to explain to you why infinity means "continues without end" and not "contains every conceivable possibility" (I am not going to attempt this because I have  learned that some people really don't want to give up their misconceptions about infinity, but if you want more information about this I highly recommend the youtube channel Numberphile while is run by the math department at the university of Cambridge) I am going to invent an irrational number right now that clearly does not contain everything in the universe.

0.101 001 000 100 001 000 001 000 000 100...

Even though a human brain can easily see a pattern in the number above (that there is one more zero between each successive 1), the pattern is non-repeating and therefore the number is irrational.

But if you translated this into ascii (as directed by the meme) you would only generate 4 possible ascii characters, and as it turns out, none of them are even letters. How are you going to write the name of every person I have ever loved using just spaces, tabs and line carriages?



Myth #3 That Pi is an Inherent Property of the Universe

Pi is a number. All numbers, and in fact all mathematics, is merely a descriptive language. Math is as much a part of the universe as English is.

But moreover, pi describes something that doesn't even exist in the real universe - a perfect circle. Pi is the relationship between the diameter and circumference of a circle. Even in the days that pi was been calculated by hand people had determined it to hundreds of decimal places. Today the world record holder in memorizing pi once recited it to 67,890 places. The world record for calculating pi by a super computer is to over 10 trillion places.

How many decimal places do you think it would take to calculate the circumference of the largest possible circle (ie the circumference of the universe) as expressed in the smallest possible unit of distance (the planck)? The answer is less than 60.

The universe has literally no use for anything more than 60 decimal places of pi. Anything beyond that is an invention of humans. It is an invention that I love, and it pains me that people wish to pervert it.