Rick Strom

You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.

— Ben Goldacre

Why only a fool argues religion. But sometimes you just can’t help it.

I figured it out. The Internet is perfectly suited to one thing. Running a joke into the ground.

My God I don’t understand how so many people can collectively be so painfully unoriginal and so painfully unfunny. If you ever wanted to know why nerds are so socially repulsive (nerds, pay attention), you need to look no further than terrible, annoying pseudo-humor like keyboard cat, LOL cats, Rick Rolling, the Portal cake, etc.

These things are mildly funny once, for about 10 seconds. If they were left at that, all would be well. Instead, ’spergin nerds on the Internet have to take them and beat them to death.

I just inadvertently watched a YouTube video that someone inexplicably thought would be funny with the stupid keyboard cat laid over it. Why this person thought this would still be funny the 1,000,000th time it has been done is beyond me, but here’s what I feel like right now:

I never really had an opinion on tasers before, because I never really took a second to think about them. But after reading about yet another taser death this morning, I took the 2 seconds required to form an opinion.

You know what? I don’t like it. This freaks me out.

According to CNN, a taser “delivers a 50,000-volt electric charge”. The thing electrocutes you. How did we just sit idly by while the police decided that electrocution was a legitimate form of restraint?

I seriously think no one has really stopped to think about that. Next time you hear taser think electrocution device and see how that rubs you.

And with all the talk about torture these days, I keep hearing the (reasonable) argument that if we don’t use a particular tactic on our own people, we shouldn’t use it on enemy combatants. I agree. If we consider it torture if it is done to us, it is torture if we do it to others.

But now I’m pretty sure we do torture our own citizens. Electrocution sure as hell seems like torture to me.

From the abstract of a paper entitled Conservatism and Cognitive Ability:

Conservatism and cognitive ability are negatively correlated. The evidence is based on 1254 community college students and 1600 foreign students seeking entry to United States’ universities. At the individual level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with SAT, Vocabulary, and Analogy test scores. At the national level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with measures of education (e.g., gross enrollment at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels) and performance on mathematics and reading assessments from the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) project. They also correlate with components of the Failed States Index and several other measures of economic and political development of nations. Conservatism scores have higher correlations with economic and political measures than estimated IQ scores.

This might explain why I just heard someone say, as recently as last fucking week, that the reason the economy is in a turmoil right now is too much regulation.

Place gun to head.

Is it still every software entrepreneur’s dream to get mentioned on TechCrunch? If so, happy day for me.

Today TechCrunch covered my recent rant about the iPhone app store hype (original post on Stromcode).

Stay tuned for my follow-up post: everyone now knows about my apps and still no one is buyin’.

Myriad patented two genes related to breast cancer (BRCA1 and BRACA2), which means that all testing and research related to those genes must go through Myriad. No second opinions, and a halt to all research related to those genes by any other company.

I understand it from a business perspective, but this is just appalling. What’s even more appalling is that this is only news now because the ACLU has filed a suit challenging the patent, even though the gene patenting has been around for almost 30 years.

I’ve always hated the “you can’t prove it doesn’t exist, therefore you might as well believe it true” argument. There must be something in the human brain that makes us embrace this total lack of logic. It’s not just in religion (namely the existence of God) — I hear people doing it all over the place. “Vaccines cause autism”, “Vitamin C prevents aging”, etc.

Carl Sagan on that topic:

“A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage”

Suppose (I’m following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you’d want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

“Show me,” you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle — but no dragon.

“Where’s the dragon?” you ask.

“Oh, she’s right here,” I reply, waving vaguely. “I neglected to mention that she’s an invisible dragon.”

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon’s footprints.

“Good idea,” I say, “but this dragon floats in the air.”

Then you’ll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

“Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless.”

You’ll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

“Good idea, but she’s an incorporeal dragon and the paint won’t stick.” And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won’t work.

Now, what’s the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there’s no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I’m asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so. The only thing you’ve really learned from my insistence that there’s a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head. You’d wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind. But then, why am I taking it so seriously? Maybe I need help. At the least, maybe I’ve seriously underestimated human fallibility. Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded. So you don’t outright reject the notion that there’s a fire-breathing dragon in my garage. You merely put it on hold. Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge you’re prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you. Surely it’s unfair of me to be offended at not being believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative — merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of “not proved.”

Imagine that things had gone otherwise. The dragon is invisible, all right, but footprints are being made in the flour as you watch. Your infrared detector reads off-scale. The spray paint reveals a jagged crest bobbing in the air before you. No matter how skeptical you might have been about the existence of dragons — to say nothing about invisible ones — you must now acknowledge that there’s something here, and that in a preliminary way it’s consistent with an invisible, fire-breathing dragon.

Now another scenario: Suppose it’s not just me. Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you’re pretty sure don’t know each other, all tell you that they have dragons in their garages — but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive. All of us admit we’re disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence. None of us is a lunatic. We speculate about what it would mean if invisible dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with us humans just catching on. I’d rather it not be true, I tell you. But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons weren’t myths at all.

Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now reported. But they’re never made when a skeptic is looking. An alternative explanation presents itself. On close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked. Another dragon enthusiast shows up with a burnt finger and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of the dragon’s fiery breath. But again, other possibilities exist. We understand that there are other ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons. Such “evidence” — no matter how important the dragon advocates consider it — is far from compelling. Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.

This tea party nonsense is… man, I actually don’t even have the words.

In a perfect world, the wise are in power. In our world, the rich control the stupid. Turn on Fox News today and have a look at a whole lot of stupid people protesting tax increases that won’t even affect them. They don’t know any better. They have been convinced of something I can’t even comprehend. I can’t be angry at them. I pity them, in fact. It must be terribly difficult to go through life without any idea how anything works. It must hurt to be that stupid.

Even more troubling though is that rich conservatives seem to think it is a perfectly justifiable move to inspire nearly violent rage in stupid Americans in order to get out of paying a little more tax. As if a few percent increase in taxes were good enough reason to start an insurrection.

Americans don’t have much of an aptitude for history, even in their own country. Luckily they only need to pay attention to the last year or so. The same people who have ruined the entire operation with their greed are now mobilizing the same people they selfishly put out of work and home to fight — to any extreme — a fraction of the loss of wealth they suffered for their masters. It is a tragic thing that people like this still exist, but even more tragic that there are so many rich in this country willing to exploit them without remorse.

When I was living in Santa Barbara years ago, I used to frequently make the drive from Anaheim back to SB really late at night. Twice on that drive I saw something odd.

Shadow People

The first time, I was returning from a friends wedding in San Pedro. Around 3:30am I rounded a bend on the 101 near La Conchita, tired out of my mind, when suddenly I saw 2-3 dark figures in front of my truck. My recollection was that they were so dark that I didn’t see them until just that moment when my headlights passed over them, which happened when they were about 5 feet from my bumper.

I swerved off the road, into the dirt, and nearly smashed into the cliffside. I jumped out of the truck to go see if I hit anyone and if they were ok, but saw nothing. No one. Just me and the 101 and a lot of darkness.

Black Triangle

A couple months later, I was passing roughly the same area, at roughly the same time. The sky at that hour up there is pitch black, but at one point there is a giant smokestack that belches fire 24/7, and the flame illuminates the sky somewhat.

This was my UFO encounter. I saw a giant, black triangle moving really, really slowly over a hill in the distance. It was moving about the speed of a blimp. Then it was gone.

In both of these cases, I pretty immediately dismissed what I saw for a couple reasons. In the case of the shadow people sighting, I had just recently started listening to Coast to Coast AM, back when Art Bell still hosted it. I didn’t listen because I’m a true believer or anything, I just found the whole thing amusing and I love crazy talk. But a common subject on that show was shadow people, something I hadn’t even heard of until I started listening. I’m pretty sure this was my imagination conjuring up something I had heard on the radio.

The UFO sighting came at the height of my X-Files fandom. Again, I was unaware that UFOs came in triangular shape until I started watching X-Files, and again I’m almost convinced that what I saw was a hallucination brought about by way too many hours watching X-Files.

Not to mention in both cases it was beyond the middle of the night and 1.5 hours into a long, tedious drive I had made many, many times before. In all likelihood I fell asleep at the wheel and was just sleep driving. That’s a scary enough thought, thank you.

I did find out a decade later that the spot I saw the triangle is a known UFO sighting hotspot. But still I’m pretty sure I was just sleeping.

The USO

Which brings me to an event about 2 months ago.

There is a spot up near the county line off PCH I have been going to late at night since I moved to LA. There are a couple reasons I go there. It’s dark, there are no people, and you can see every damn star in the sky. I go there to relax, and sometimes I go there to scare the shit out of myself. It’s one of those places you could be killed and no one would find your body for a good bit. Certainly no one would hear your screams.

So this one particular night I was out there, standing on a cliff overlooking the ocean. It was pitch black, not a person or car within sight. As I was staring at the ocean, I noticed what looked like a roadside flare suddenly light up on the water and burn. The flame was white, blinding white, the kind of light that you feel in your eyes minutes after it stops. Then it burned out. I don’t know why initially this didn’t seem that odd to me. It should have, considering there were no people anywhere around me and no reason for a flare to be burning in the ocean just a couple feet off the shore.

This repeated two more times, but the third time the flame actually burned underwater. Now I was curious. The flame died out again, and then shit got strange.

Under the water, I saw 4 bright, spherical lights. From where I was standing I would estimate them to be about twice the size of a human head. They just lit up under the surface of the water, but they didn’t move. The first image in my head was of one of those old timey submarines, all made out of bronze and glass. Something steampunk, almost.

Then, the water started glowing green.

This in itself doesn’t surprise me. I also used to go to this spot to see the bioluminescense when the red tide rolled in. When the waves crash, the entire ocean seems to light up either green or blue. One night I went out there it was so strong that taking a step on the sand would cause the beach to light up! The bioluminescent bacteria were actually soaked into the sand.

So I knew what was lighting up the water, I just didn’t really understand why they were lighting up. Something about whatever was under there was freaking out the sealife and causing it to glow.

Now here is where I did a weird thing. I fucking split. Normally I like to consider myself a guy who will get killed by curiosity eventually, but I had this sense that tonight was the night, and I wasn’t ready for it. So I jumped in my car and tore out of there. Something just felt like I wasn’t supposed to be there.

That night, safely away from… whatever, I again dismissed it. I convinced myself it must have been some divers or some personal submarine or something. The only thing was, where this was all happening, the water should have only been around 2 feet deep. That was the thing I couldn’t get out of my head. That water was far too shallow for what I was looking at.

Fast forward to a couple nights ago. I had TIVOed an episode of the UFO Hunters on the History channel. I love the concept of this show, but I can’t stand that Bill Birnes guy. He is just way too ready to believe anything, and his understanding of scientific proof would make a creationist chuckle. But it is a fun show, nonetheless. The episode I had ready to watch was on USOs, and I put off watching it because the USO concept is ridiculous to me. I had seen something on History years ago and found the whole thing silly as all get out.

But I finally watched it. The creepy thing was, everyone they interviewed in Florida or near Guantanamo had described pretty much exactly what I saw. Exactly.

This time, I hadn’t seen or heard the lore before having my own experience. I had it, then heard about what I saw.

I don’t know what the hell it was, but I am definitely curious now.