Brews you can Use

I went to the post office today during my lunch break, and had to make a rather unceremonious sudden left turn to make the parking lot. Grrr.... the route to the post office is the same way I used to drive to Marino's deli a couple days a week, and my autopilot tried to take me there again.

I stopped going to Marino's in mid-November. The last time I went, the owner (I presume) was in doing the books and launched into a right-wing/pro-Bush political rant. I was still smarting from Kerry's loss at that point, and the thought that this particular bit of my money may have helped Bush, even indirectly, was extremely disturbing. I haven't been back since. That's the risk of mixing business with politics, I guess.

And it's a shame, too. Marino's made two of the tastiest sandwiches I ever had, but they just don't taste as good with the side of creeping fascism.... They probably don't want my icky liberal dollars anyway :-)

Or: Where your humble narrator takes on the "universe" bit... aided by beer, of course.

My mind was really going last night. For some reason, I went to sleep thinking of religion. Every time my brain does that, I find myself starting from this article I read well over a year ago, but has stuck with me ever since. It planted the idea in my head of a difference between faith and belief, namely that faith in God may not require intellectually believing in God as a supernatural entity. My mind's been riffing on that thought for quite a while now, but it's pretty heavy stuff to think about when you're trying to get some sleep.

Anyway, I had pretty much resolved that it didn't matter from a faith perspective whether God was a deity, a "social construction," or just a literary abstraction for the good that is in all of us. He/it still exists in some sense, and you still have something to cling to. Corrollary to this is that God doesn't actually answer prayers in the "Magick" sense of intervening in world events, other people's behavior, etc. That is, it doesn't make sense to pray that something happens or doesn't happen, or that other people do or don't do something. Prayer (in this model) can affect the person doing the praying, no more, no less.

The only thing I was uncomfortable with in this theory was the "social construction" ontology, which is generally a red flag for bad philosophy and sloppy thought in my experience (although it makes for entertaining sci-fi). So I started thinking about other things that exist, but only because people think they do. I immediately thought of economics, with prices and markets being a "social construction" but definitely existing. Nah, too sloppy. Plus mingling God and money didn't give me a good feeling at all. Then it hit me: the Real number system. It exists, but really only in the mind of its users. It's also a very rigorously defined thing with known properties so two people can work with the same mathematical object. Its properties also don't change to match any one person's misconceptions about it.

I was one of those who believe mathematicians "discover" rather than "create." That is, every result a mathematician proves was true before the proof, the mathematician just happened to be the one two discover the proof making the result something other mathematicians can accept and work with. Because of this, mathematical proofs did strike me more as revelation than construction. Revealed theology as a kind of mathematical proof? It could work, hold that thought...

Of course, I couldn't resist going on a tangent, testing myself to remember how much of my math education was still with me by re-hashing the construction of the real number system from the rationals. The Dedekind cut method is traditional, and a few textbooks I've read use it. In class, we constructed the real numbers as equivalence classes of Cauchy sequences, probably because we did this exercise in a course on infinite sequences and series. That course was one of the more fun math courses I've ever had. The material is approachable, but challenging enough to actually make you feel you've earned your QEDs.

All this, in turn reminded me of the Surreal Numbers I had read about maybe a week ago, which include the real numbers as a subset and have a very easy to follow, well-motivated construction. They were discovered in the 1970s, and I mused for a few minutes on whether it would be appropriate to use them in math education to construct the real numbers, or if it were better to follow the historical development of mathematical concepts, or use the best current methods, e.g. for constructing the real number system. It's probably a wash. The historical approach gives a better feel for how mathematics progresses, but the modern methods approach could open up new ways of thinking in the next generation of mathematicians (at the expense of de-emphasizing the old ways of thinking).

Meanwhile, my mind was also multitasking on problems from work. I've been reading heavily about the Diablo USENET server software as a possible upgrade to our aging news servers at work, and pondering how one would use its storage model for mail instead of news, and whether you would want to in the first place. The sorry state of the USENET servers at work haunted me still further that night.

I dreamt that Rebecca of Hitherby Dragons had moved in across the alley. Odd that my brain picked her, since I've only read one and a half posts on that site, the Night of the Antinomian story, and I tried to read her simultaneous parody of "Chronicles of Narnia" and "Atlas Shrugged" but decided I didn't have the stomach or the time. Anyway, she moves in across the alley, and it just turns out she's a customer of ours, a big USENET user, and is pissed off about the sorry state of our news servers. She decided to "drop me a hint" by pinning up a note on the clothesline in our back yard. I don't remember the exact wording, except that it was pinned up as individual letters cut out of paper, and disemvoweled so I could barely read it.

I tried to relay the feedback to my co-workers the next day, but none of them were interested. In fact, they all looked rather wooden, with thousand-yard stares looking right through me. Then I woke up, confused and annoyed, and almost got out of bed to look in the backyard to read Rebecca's message before it finally sunk in that I had been dreaming after too much spicy food....

One moderately cool thing about running this little blog on my own web server is being able to access the logs. Specifically, the referrer URLs from search engine sites, which generally include the search string. Some of my favorites:

  fix to toshiba S127 problem of free BSD
  how to boot freebsd 5.3 in toshiba S127

Hey! my site's actually useful: it at least got this fix indexed on google, currently the first hit for the first, and the only hit for the second.

  Historical IPA

Enjoying this one with ice cream right now (yes, it's an odd pairing; I'm not sure I'd recommend it, although it's not half as bad as it sounds, and a fair bit better than a lot of wine and food pairings I've been sold). This one's also the first hit on google as of a few minutes ago, ahead of the original recipe I used as a base.

  calorie counts beer Rasputin

Funny. There's a great beer named (Old) Rasputin, but I was talking about the Boney M/Boiled in Lead song. And, of course, beer.

  brew beer broken glass thermometer

Not a recommended brewing adjunct. May we kindly suggest searching for "perforated bowel" in addition?

  for what makes yeast foam

It foams for thee.

  hallucination in sport
  her sweet hand

???... Apparently the second one's a porn site, and the search eventually hits "a sweet hand-turned chalice" from my homebrew contest post a couple weeks ago, but the first I can't figure out. Band name?

Sigh. I don't know what I was thinking with the whole woodworking thing. I used to think I could get a little bit done in the evenings after Grace goes to sleep, but recently that's been pretty late, and I've been rather unambitious by that point. Part of the problem is that I have no projects in mind, and disappearing downstairs for a long sharpening session just isn't turning me on for some odd reason....

And now I'm watching an episode of Wood Works, and thinking "yeah, I was going to start doing that at some point." Of course, I'm mostly noting the absurdity of the host using a planer and jointer to make a basic hand plane. It just seems wrong, and I can't quite figure out why. I mean, I've used a halfway-decent workbench to make sawhorses, which is about as wrong. Doubly so, in fact, as I haven't used the sawhorses to make anything of note so far, or really made anything else wood-y on the workbench (I did wire up some pumps for the brewery, and used the vise to hold some plumbing fittings, but otherwise, it's just been storage for idle tools).

Maybe I'll just have to convert some wood into boxes until I think of something better...