New Blog, Old Story February 14, 2009
Posted by John Moeller in Blog, Personal, School.1 comment so far
This is most of the “about” page of my new blog that I’m setting up for my PhD studies. I wanted to relate the whole story of why I’m doing what I’m doing:
This is a blog about using topology to compute, hopefully educating a few people on the subject of topology, and tossing a career aside to pursue a PhD. If you’ve come here expecting a topo map geek, you’re looking for a much different kind of geek (and one that’s probably in much better shape). I do like maps quite a bit, though. And I’ll probably talk about them in an abstract sense.
[Math babble removed]
So what’s this about tossing away my career? My undergrad degree is in math, but that’s not where I ended up. I landed in software, and I’ve been working as a programmer long enough to qualify for “senior software engineer” positions. Despite the fact that I’ve been laid off a few times due to various economic fluctuations, it was a good career. About a year ago, I decided that I was tired of working on other people’s ideas. I wanted to command a better salary, have more choice in what I could do, and above all, get some freedom in choosing projects. I decided to see about a Master’s. I took a few classes to get a feel for it, and at the end of a semester, one of my profs convinced me to try for a PhD instead. It’s almost a year later, and I’ve been accepted to the program at the University of Utah and officially start in Fall (though I’m doing research now).
People who know what’s involved in my choices probably think that I’m crazy. That’s certainly true. However, I’d have to say that it would be more insane for me to keep a career that seems (to my experience) to reward mediocrity. It’s not that you can’t do good work in software. I have known many excellent engineers over the years, and they are extremely bright people. I get the idea that the tech industry as a whole isn’t interested in pushing the boundary, especially during recessions. There are, of course, companies that do push the boundary, but they hire researchers to do it. Microsoft, nVidia, Google, AT&T, Cisco; all of them have the juice to hire docs. The rest are more than happy to reward a good idea that sells, but investing in the effort is a concept that seems to be lost on them. After a while, it becomes a matter of investment for the engineer as well. If for the same amount, I can do less work, why do more? This is the sad state of affairs for many industries, not just software.
So my decision was basically made for me when my company laid me off and 4 other engineers (it wasn’t for my whining either; I still have a good relationship with my old bosses and coworkers). I decided that it was an opportunity to make school a priority. Research is what I really want to do, despite my advisor’s warnings. So here I am. And you get to read me babble about topology.
You can find it here, if you’re interested.
Meat Part II February 9, 2009
Posted by John Moeller in Personal, Philosophy.Tags: beef, ethics, meat
1 comment so far
For those wondering, which is probably zero of you, I decided to move beef to the “special occasions” segment of my diet. Because beef production is probably the most egregious contributor to carbon emission, that goes first. I’m not ethically opposed to eating animals, so I think that it’s alright to have a really great steak or hamburger on special occasions (like an anniversary or birthday).
Having beef be a part of my regular diet is probably too much, both for the environment and my health. I’m trying to put more fruits, veggies, and complex carbs into my diet as well. So fast-food and freezer meals with beef are out (the ones not already in my freezer, anyway). Pork may come next, I haven’t decided yet. The carbon footprint of pork isn’t great, but it’s still a small fraction of that of beef.
I think that the important thing to remember is that I’m not going to change the world myself on this, even if I shout really loud. It’s going to take time to wean Americans off of beef. It’s so much a part of our culture now that people will fight to keep it. Americans are accustomed to cheap beef (and meat in general), and we won’t want to give up that privilege.
I think that one of the things that will help this happen is if we remove beef subsidies. It’s irresponsible to pour money into something so wasteful. When you go to the meat section of your supermarket and see a wall of red, much of which will be discarded, it’s a little obscene. We have plentiful sources of food here, so we’ll be fine (and as I’ve stated before, we need to scale back our meat consumption anyway). It should also free up some agricultural land for other crops that will be far more efficient. That’s really where I think we should start. I don’t think that we need to stop eating beef altogether, but I do think that it should be a delicacy, not a staple.
I’m Still Alive February 8, 2009
Posted by John Moeller in Personal, School, Science.Tags: research, work
1 comment so far
Still alive, and now employed. I’ll be doing research for one of my profs. This is exactly where I want to be right now. I get to produce and experiment and think really hard, which are things that I find very rewarding. Many of you probably think that I’m insane, especially those of you who already do this. However, I think that I’d be insane to try to go back to the day-to-day grind. Plus, it’s a foot in the door of school. In fact, I can probably be safe saying that I’m in, considering that I’m a research assistant now. Probably. My cautious nature means that I still can’t commit to the idea completely without a statement on official letterhead.
The only unfortunate thing is that the pay isn’t great, so I’m going to see if I can freelance a little to make some extra cash. That promises to be an interesting experience. I’ll have to bid for software jobs and see what comes my way, and I’m hoping that process will give me good practice for writing grant proposals. There’s also going to be a little bit of belt-tightening going on around here. I’ll probably cook more, and I’m going to see if I can get my hands on one of those fancy coffee makers that grinds the beans for you and makes coffee at designated times. There’s no way I’m going to pay a single dollar more for the coffee from the gas station next door. It may as well have come from the pumps.
This all came at an incredibly weird time. Had I been working, I doubt that I would have felt comfortable taking the job. But I got laid off, so it was an easy decision. Quirky and I had already talked about this, so it just came a little sooner than expected. It’s almost as if … some invisible force … wanted me to do this! Ahem. Not really. This is just a case of taking something shitty and turning it to one’s advantage by seizing the right opportunities. It’s also the reason that you don’t panic when something shitty happens. You stop and reassess your options, and graciously accept the help of your friends and family. Then you remember what they did for you, and help them out when they need it.
This Blog February 8, 2009
Posted by John Moeller in Blog, Personal.2 comments
I haven’t felt like blogging much lately, and I’m wondering if it’s because of my transitional phase. I’m probably going to start a research blog, which I’m sure will be very exciting to all of you (!). I don’t know if that will take up all of my blogging time, or if I’ll still blog here as well. I’m not sure why I didn’t blog more after I was laid off. I think that may have had something to do with the drama that ensued in the comments on my last meat post (at least half of which was surely my doing).
After it settled down, I was afraid that I’d have to write every blog entry in a way that was unambiguous to everyone on the Internet. I realize now that that’s just silly. This is my blog. It’s my opinion, and people who visit should remember that. I’m not holding myself out as some kind of expert on ethics. In fact, I stated that I wasn’t. Additionally, this is a skeptically-minded blog. If people bring arguments against what I say, I try to counter them. I’m not going to hedge my tone. I can’t cater to the entire Internet.
My mistake was probably just that; in catering to the idea that I needed to defend my tone. I spent a lot of time dancing around the issue when I should have realized that one of the commenters was shifting the burden of clarity too far over to my side. What I should have done is avoid restating what I said, and insist on direct questions. I should have forced arguments about tone out of the thread entirely (since it was an ethical discussion), and it should have been about explicit questions, claims, and statements. Instead I fed straight into the drama that was brought to my door.
To get back to blogging, I think that it’s been a good outlet for me. I’m just not sure where I’m going to do it right now. Obviously, I need to keep a lid on my emotions if I’m going to do it as part of a research setting. Blogging right after you think “what the hell do they mean by that?” is probably a bad practice. That’s one of those times where you go do something mindless for a while to clear your head.
Another One Bites the Dust January 15, 2009
Posted by John Moeller in Personal.Tags: job, layoff
4 comments
A job that is; this time it was mine. I was laid off yesterday from my company.
It’s a really weird time for me; on the one hand, it sucks to be unemployed. I’ve been there before, and it’s no treat. On the other, I consider this an opportunity to make school the higher priority. I’m going to see if I can find some contract work, maybe even some work that I can do at home, and make it fit around my school schedule.
I’m doing ok, other than the prospect of my bank account diminishing for a while. As I said, I’ve been through this before, and it’s just a matter of getting things lined up in the right order, and tightening the belt a little.
And I won’t turn down a job lead if you’ve got one for me. :-D
WordPress January 10, 2009
Posted by John Moeller in Uncategorized.add a comment
Interesting. When you concatenate “Word” and “press,” you get “WordPress.” You can type “wordpress.” But you can’t get a capital ‘W’ and a lowercase ‘p’. It appears that WordPress censors this for you, except in the title that appears in the window frame. I titled this post with a lowercase ‘p’ and a capital ‘W’, but it only appears that way in the window frame. Weird.
Commenting Policy Is Up January 10, 2009
Posted by John Moeller in Uncategorized.add a comment
My commenting policy is up. It’s linked to the right, under “Pages.”
I’ll repeat it here:
- I reserve the right to delete comments or ban people for any reason whatsoever. Don’t take it personally.
- Don’t be obscene. My interpretation of the word obscene is quite liberal. No porn, no racism, no bigotry, etc. Respect me and respect everyone else reading the blog.
- Don’t be a dick. Use common sense. Play nice, and others will play nice with you.
- Don’t be annoying. If you force me to pay attention to you, I will. And I’ll make it so that I never have to do it again.
- Make your point. Please don’t ramble. If you have a point to make, make it. If you want to back it up with your case, do so, but please try to be clear and brief.
- Don’t copy your content into my comments. If you have your own blog, wonderful. If you’d like to make others aware of your related content, leave a link. If I think that it’s interesting, I’ll be more apt to link to it in one of my own posts.
Use common sense, and you should be OK.
Regarding a Recent Comment January 10, 2009
Posted by John Moeller in Uncategorized.add a comment
Yesterday, a commenter named “exuvia” left some comments on my post “Eating Meat,” and my “Who Am I?” page. I thought that the comments were a little odd, so I Googled the IP address. One of the hits that I got was through www.projecthoneypot.org, which associated the IP address with a mail server and a dictionary attacker. In and of itself, this information doesn’t mean anything. It may be that it was used for that purpose before “exuvia” had the address. Or it may just be that “exuvia” shares the IP with multiple customers at the same ISP.
However: when a link is added with the comments, that sends up a red flag for me. You can set up a wordpress blog to send you the IP address and email address of anyone who comments on it. In the interest of being cautious, I deleted the comments, and wrote this comment:
By the way, I think that “exuvia” commenter was running a phishing attack. If you looked at that blog, please don’t comment on it. You would reveal your IP address and email address to that person.
The IP address of the commenter came up as an Ecuadoran IP address that is associated with several attacks. It looked fishy (or phishy, I guess), and I don’t trust this person with my readers.
After seeing that, “exuvia” contacted me. Apparently, he or she was quite upset about my choice of actions, and explained his or her case quite eloquently, which was a departure from the comments that were left on the post (they wandered and didn’t make much sense to me). This person considered it a matter of personal honor that I made my choice of actions: “In the interest of personal honour – yours and mine – I would like for you to clarify to both me and your readers.”
I edited the comment to explain what I found, and to explain my actions:
I expected “exuvia” to just see that and move on, but he or she took umbrage to this comment. I’m not going to apologize for erring on the side of caution, though. I do want to clarify that just because the IP address in question is from Ecuador, does not mean I think sources of traffic from Ecuador to be suspect. Such a conclusion would be ridiculous. The important piece of information is that according to http://www.projecthoneypot.org, the address in question was associated with attacks:
“The Project Honey Pot system has detected behavior from the IP address consistent with that of a mail server and dictionary attacker. Below we’ve reported some other data associated with this IP. This interrelated data helps map spammers’ networks and aids in law enforcement efforts. If you know something about this IP, please leave a comment.”
I did not leave a comment, or pursue this with any authorities. All this means is that administrators who have the Project Honeypot software installed have detected this address in association with a mail server or dictionary attacker. I decided to err on the side of caution.
If it truly is the case that I have erred, then “exuvia” has my apologies. As I said before, however, I will not apologize for being cautious.
I have also added other explanations above. Again: if it truly is the case that I have erred, then “exuvia” has my apologies. I still have no real way of knowing this, though, and I have to trust that this person means well. So again, I won’t apologize for being cautious. Am I overly cautious? Perhaps.
I do want to say one last thing. If your personal honor is damaged by someone not trusting you on the Internet, you need to reconsider how you view your personal interactions online. It is very difficult to obtain information about someone enough that I can trust them. I can’t see your face. I don’t know where you really are. I can’t hear your voice. All I have from you is some words and a couple identifiers that don’t mean much. It’s not personal to me. In the future, I’ll seriously consider being less aggressive about censoring my blog comments. “Exuvia,” I never banned you from comment, and you are welcome to comment in the future.
I’ll write a page with my commenting policy very soon. I would also remind my readers that almost any blog that you comment on requires you to leave identifying information, so be cautious.
Eating Meat January 9, 2009
Posted by John Moeller in Philosophy.Tags: ethics, meat, vegetarian
18 comments
Alright, it’s late, I’ve been bored all day, and I can’t stand reading about tangent spaces anymore tonight. So I’ll inflict my relatively uninformed opinion on an ethical matter upon you.
First, a little background. I tend to undergo quite a bit of introspection on controversial ethical issues. As an atheist and irreligious person, I don’t have a dogma to fall back on, so I like to think these issues through from every angle that I can think of. I’ve done this for many years on the issue of abortion, and I’d like to think that I have a fairly solid basis for my opinion on the topic. Opinion is the operative word here. I’m not an ethicist, nor do I read a lot of ethics. I do try to gather a lot of differing views on these topics, though.
Over the past year or so, I’ve been examining my ethics on eating meat. I haven’t reached the point of vegetarianism by a long shot, because I’m still weighing the sides of the issue. The trouble is that there are problems with both the viewpoint that eating meat is acceptable, and the viewpoint that it is not. I tend to be a centrist on a lot of issues, and the reason is this: there tends to be a systematic lack of critical thinking by both sides.
Here are the problems that I see with both sides:
Problems with the viewpoint that eating meat is acceptable:
- Sustainability:The practice of eating meat has some obvious sustainability implications, and the fact that we are rapidly approaching the limit of usable real estate on this planet. Old models of agriculture won’t work. This objection mostly stems from beef ranching, which requires a lot of space. Pork ranching may not require as much real estate, especially because we can recycle food for pork feed. Poultry ranching is even less.
Fish harvesting (not including fish farming) is really a separate problem. Here, we’re going out into the native environment to harvest fish, but there’s still a sustainability question, as the recent problems with tuna fishing have demonstrated (i.e., we may be fishing tuna to extinction; that surprised me).
- Cruelty:Don’t worry, I’m not shilling for PETA here. However, the treatment of animals, especially mammals, raises some difficult ethical questions in regards to their treatment. Animals can experience a great deal of pain, and they have my sympathy. This is why we have cruelty laws and guidelines, and it’s also why I support them. I think that if I plan to eat an animal, the least that I can do is to make it painless for the animal.
- Environmental damage:First, I take the position that much of the Earth is worth conserving for its innate beauty, geologically, botanically, and zoologically. Because of that, I am concerned about the environmental impact of beef ranching (and sheep ranching, for that matter), especially in the American West, where I live.
The other part of this objection is mostly related to sustainability, particularly of resources that we need to make available for human beings. Ranching is a particularly inefficient concentration of energy. The climatological impact of ranching is in my opinion a little too tenuous to address. The other factors however, render this objection non-trivial.
- Health: Despite many dubious claims to the contrary, eating large quantities of food from animal sources has been shown empirically to cause health problems. Americans in particular need to eat less meat and more plants. Several food industries have warped the baseline of what is considered to be a “normal” diet through decades of marketing.
Problems with the viewpoint that eating meat is unacceptable:
- Emotion: Many of the objections to eating meat rely on an appeal to emotion, whether they are religiously based or not. I won’t try to argue against the religious standpoint, because it is based on dogma, rather than facts. I would like, though, to address the non-religious arguments for vegetarianism, which often have attempts to justify them ethically.
These arguments seem primarily to center around anthropomorphizing vertebrates. I’m not trying to belittle these arguments (“save the cuddly ones,” etc.); however, the ascription of basic conditions (like pain), and especially more abstract conditions (like suffering, sadness, and desperation), rely in varying degrees upon the “quacks like a duck” principle (if you’ll forgive the expression), instead of empirical studies of the existence of these conditions in other species.
- Lack of consistency:Certain species, or even whole groups of organisms, seem to be glossed over by some vegetarians.
I’ll try to clarify what I mean by way of example. Recently, I remember seeing a print ad for PETA featuring Paul McCartney. In the ad, McCartney claimed that he became a vegetarian when fishing, upon seeing the fish that he just caught gasp for oxygen. This made him realize that the fish had a motivation to breathe just like his. My response to this is that obviously it did. It’s an animal, and animals need oxygen in order to survive. Without survival reflexes, animals would die. But the same is true for plants, albeit in a much different way. Some plants are quite aggressive about respiring, and grow a lot of foliage. Does this imply some kind of fervor to live? What is it about vertebrates in particular that make them special?
I’ve reached my goal of tiredness, so I’m going to stop here. These lists aren’t exhaustive, and this is really just the start of this ethical exploration. I hope to get back to this issue.
The Year in Review (What I Can Remember, Anyway) January 2, 2009
Posted by John Moeller in atheism, Blog, Internet, Personal, Politics, Science.2 comments
I’ve run out of things to do, so I guess I’ll write a blog post.
So, a bunch of stuff happened in 2008. It’s been a pretty eventful year in the world as a whole. This is what it’s been for me:
Going to school
Much of my time and effort has gone into attending school this year. It’s been interesting, and I didn’t really give myself much of a reprieve over the summer. I finished my application, all of my recommendations from endorsers are in (finally!), and now I just get to wait for the result. I decided that I’m going to take two classes again, but it’s going to be easier this time because I only go to class 3 days a week instead of 5.
Less atheism, more secularism
I kind of dropped off the atheism scene, simply because the meetup times just didn’t work with my schedule. I didn’t really start going again since. I’m not less of an atheist, really. Just less of an active atheist. My interests in that area have really shifted more toward science education, separation of church and state, and science policy. Though my total activism output has lessened since I’ve been attending school.
Politics
You’d have to live under a rock or in a remote village not to have followed politics at all this year. What a ride! This has to have been the most exciting election in my memory. Plus, in issues that I’ve been following, Obama has made a commitment to better science education and better science policy. We’ll see if he follows through on that. On the more unfortunate side, we’ve seen Proposition 8 get passed in California. This is a vile stain on our country, and I predict that it will propel the issue of gay rights farther forward than we’ve ever seen it.
2008 is also the year that I really got into Twitter. Twitter is a really odd beast. I don’t think that you can really get the power of Twitter unless you have a mobile. It really became obvious to me how cool it was after I connected my mobile to my account (I also get free unlimited texts). I was one of the many people who followed MarsPhoenix. It was really cool to find out firsthand when the lander found ice. I’ve since added all of the other NASA missions that use Twitter.
Sometimes Twitter’s tedious, when someone decides that they need to go on about something, but when all is said and done, tweets like this make it all worthwhile. When you can watch your friends descend into a drunken stupor without being there to see it? ‘Nuff said.
