Danwei and I have finished moving into our new house right at the onset of spring here in Sweden. It’s located in the northern part of Stockholm which gives us a leisurely 17 minute drive to work. Built in 2008, the townhouse meets EU regulations on energy efficiency and build quality. It has a dedicated carport and small front yard which should give me some fun gardening tasks during the warm part of the year, but won’t require a tiresome amount of maintenance. Here it is:

An important part of the room, in case you haven’t noticed, is our TV and speaker system. A related gadget that I find particularly fun, is “the butt-kicker”. It’s a set of speaker coils I’ve screwed into sofa that shake hard when bass sounds under 50hz are played. Explosions in games and movies become at least 10x better!

The kitchen has more drawers and cabinets than I know what to do with. Same thing goes with the fridge.

Danwei already had a walk-in closet at our last apartment so to top it she claimed the entire wall as her closet space, which I sort of had to agree to if I wanted this to become our house.

Not only that but she also got this whole bathroom to herself.

Upstairs we find Danwei’s pet bunny and an alcove facing a forest behind our house.

To the left is “my room”, where I have my server, monitor speakers, and a double bed-sofa for guests.

In my room there is actually a walk-in closet where I can indulge in all my fancy-pants needs.
To the right of the alcove, Danwei has a study room where she does her arts and crafts.

Lastly, I’m glad to have my own bathroom upstairs where I can be the boss.

When wondering about the nature of our universe, people too often ask why, as opposed to how. Why are ants so selfless? Why are we divided into male and female? Why do we exist? The problem with asking why is that it imbues a  sense of sentient intent on part of the subject, which is most often not pertinent, nor helpful in answering such questions. In biology it  can be especially difficult to avoid thinking in those terms seeing as how one of the most striking properties of life is its apparent purposiveness. So, how exactly do we come to be so “determined”, if you will?

“The Selfish Gene” was written in 1976 by Richard Dawkins in order to explain in layman’s words the mechanisms behind a gene-centered view of evolution, as opposed to an organism-centered view. While a number of topics are covered, a large portion of the book is dedicated to exemplifying how evolutionarily stable strategies (ESS) function. In essence an ESS is a strategy that, if adopted by a population of individuals, cannot be invaded by individuals with another strategy. Again, the word strategy conjures up thoughts of conscious choice, whereas in reality it is merely a trait that proves to be evolutionarily advantageous in a given environment. That is to say, advantageous to the gene itself, not necessarily the individual organism. A gene which says, “Body, if you are very much smaller than your litter-mates, give up the struggle and die”, could be successful in the gene pool, because it has a fifty per cent chance of being in the body of each sibling saved. Altruism towards members of the same species and especially next of kin is not easily explained through group selection, but is easily modeled using a gene-centric perspective. Especially interesting to me was a section discussing why social insects go kamikaze in order to protect the colony. It turns out that in most super-organism societies, individuals are actually sterile clones of each other!

Though the biology-related material in the book was new and interesting to me, I almost equally enjoyed the callous and scientific language used when discussing potentially loaded subjects. Perhaps it was not the intention of professor Dawkins to come across that way but I appreciated the philosophical undertones the texts carried with them nonetheless. The book contains delightful analogies such as comparing our bodies to disposable vessels or space-ships carrying our genes around. I rather like the thought of comparing my body to an advanced space-ship… The author also introduces the term meme as a unit of human culture that propagates itself in the world of our consciousness. A meme for “belief in god” might only have evolved at all simply because it was advantageous to itself, much like a normal gene evolving in nature.

I’d like to conclude by paraphrasing a clever part of the book which was cross-discipline:
When we say things such as, “Deep Blue doesn’t really think when it plays chess because it can only do what it’s programmers have told it to do” we might as well be saying, “Humans can’t really think because we can only do what our genes have programmed us to do”.

The main reason I read this book was to add some classic fiction works to my often dry and topical reading list. Also the title of the book sounded cool. What was not cool was the story, which summed up in one sentence amounts to: A man steers his steam-ship deep into the dark jungle of Congo and contemplates the black darkness of society and the even darker darkness inside every person’s heart. There was so much darkness in this book, I get sleepy just thinking about it.

While the novel is lauded as a seminal work of English literature, I can’t say that I was terribly impressed with its analysis of human nature. Seldom do works that rest on an aesthetic base also have truly didactic properties. The actual narrative is set up as a story within a story where a man named Marlow recounts an adventure he had in the jungle where his mission was to kidnap an ivory trader named Mr. Kurtz and bring him back to society. During this journey, Marlow spends an awful lot of time dwelling on the darkness lurking beneath the civilized exteriors of individuals he meets along the way. This notion is also explored from the opposite side, when the normally savage and cultureless Africans display traits which Marlow empathizes with. At the end of the book, our protagonist finds the legendary Mr. Kurtz but in an ailing and frail state. The grandiose ivory trader dies in his sleep but not before whispering something epic like, “The horror! The horror!” After this Marlow has nothing to do but return back to Europe and give Kurtz’s few possessions to a woman that cries for a couple of pages. The End.

For a book supposedly focused on evil and darkness, I was expecting more content on the actual emotions and motivations behind people committing heinous and unspeakable acts but, alas, there was none. I have a feeling that Joseph Conrad simply wrote a book about an adventure he had while visiting Africa and literary intellectuals have unfortunately dissected it into psychological mumbo jumbo.

About a month ago I received a link to a song that was made, I presume, for internal promotion at Microsoft. While the tune was professionally produced, it was a bit folksy and.. well... lame. So in three evenings I recorded a metal song that would be more energetic and fun to listen to. The track is a modified version of Austrian Death Machine's "Come With Me", but with different lyrics and my unskilled guitar work.

While browsing an old bookstore, my wife stumbled upon this gem and knew instantly that it would be a fit for me. I typically find it very enjoyable to read stories that describe the pop-culture of ancient times, especially when it’s evident that humans have not changed much in the past few thousand years. This particular book, originally titled Philogelos, describes a particular aspect of our species that seems to have permeated the ages. That’s because, for all intents and purposes, it is the oldest joke book in existence!

This collection of humorous quips is attributed to two fourth-century wise cracks named Hierocles and Philagrios. Though the Romans had ruled the whole known world for a thousand years, our (presumably) drunken duo were unmistakably Greek. Apparently the Greeks expressed themselves quite literally in common speech, and found verbal contradictions or alternative connotations to be tremendously funny. Understandably, this particular style of humor does not always stand the test of time very well. At first glance, we would probably dismiss a large number of jokes as youthful slapstick, whereas our forefathers would be cracking up merely at their notion. It is actually quite common for old books to be laced with humor that we are completely oblivious to because the local inside-jokes are lost in time. What we still have with us today though, are the subjects of all these jokes: idiots, foreigners, smart-asses, and fat people.

Hairdresser: How shall I cut your hair sir?
Client: In silence please.

Though Gottlob Frege might not be a popular or mainstream thinker, he laid down the foundation for one of the most important philosophical  movements in history, namely, analytic philosophy. While Aristotle’s logic couldn’t even represent trivial inferences in Euclidean geometry, Frege’s work lead to the formalization of Russel’s Principia Mathematica, Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, and Tarski’s theory of thruth.

Frege wrote Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik in 1884 with the intent of laying down an a priori analytic-based treatise on what we refer to as numbers. We now know in retrospect that logicism as a singular way to reduce all of mathematics to pure logic did not survive the test of time. However, its rigorous logical formalism did.

Using words to describe mathematics certainly is difficult. Saying that the number 1 is a thing is like defining a definite article in terms of its indefinite article. In Grundlagen, Frege defines numbers as objects that assert something about a concept. What does this mean? In daily speech, we usually use numbers much in the same way we use adjectives: “I see five ants” or “I see red ants”. While both properties may be regarded as objective, the difference is that every ant is red, but not every ant is five. Numbers are not properties of the ants themselves. This becomes more apparent when we convert the sentence to, “The number of ants I see is five”, where the word five is used as a singular term rather than adjectivally. The number five then belongs to a concept of ant that I see. So what is a natural number?

Frege defines ‘the number that belongs to a concept Φ’ as the extension of ‘equal to the concept Ψ’. Equality is defined as: a mutual univocal correlation of the extensions of concept terms. Zero, in turn, would be the concept of being non self-identical. Another way of expressing zero would be as the extension of a concept that has no objects falling under it. I’m not entirely certain if Frege was aware of it or if we all simply have misunderstood his ideas, but to understand the notion of univocal (one-to-one) correlation, we must first define the natural number 1. He’s given us a circular argument! A bit disappointing but not fatal to his legacy.

While Grundlagen leaves out definitions for complex numbers, imaginary numbers, infinitesimals, and more, it sets the bar on other important matters. I particularly enjoyed Frege’s long digressions on psychologism which he strongly disliked. The inductive proofs that fancy calculus mathematicians pulled out of their hats seemed to irritate him especially. I would recommend this book to someone that’s interested in mathematical philosophy but doesn’t actually want to learn too much mathematics.

Besides simply being lengthy, this book was a formidably difficult read — unless it was utter nonsense, in which case it was laughably easy. I can’t really decide which because the language was used in such an obscure way that it was extremely difficult to follow the lengthy lines of reasoning and maintain whether or not they were actually consistent. The book is further clouded by the gratuitous use of home-made words which already sound odd in German, “Zuhandenheit”, but even more so in English, “Ready-to-Hand”. Perhaps this is done on purpose, as the author is fond of the hermeneutic circle and feels this is the only way to approach the main topic of the book: What is the true nature of Being?

Being and Time, which is considered one of the premier philosophical works of the 20th century, was written my Martin Heidegger to address a question which he felt had been overlooked in philosophy. He believed that while most philosophers had been chiefly concerned which things that exist, they’d never given a satisfactory definition of what it actually means to exist. The fact that Being seems self-evident to us is exemplified by how easily it is overlooked in quotes such as “I think, therefore I am”. Even the question “what is being?” contains a form of Being in it. While Martin had originally planned on addressing the whole issue in six parts spread out over two books, he was only given time to finish two parts before having to prepare the material for publication. In these two parts he discusses three subjects, namely the meaning of Being, a being called Dasein, and Temporality.

In Martin’s ontological structure, the meaning of Being is grasping how something becomes intelligible, which necessarily precedes things like propositions or science, and may be viewed as a destruction of traditional meta-physics.  Since there is no way to access Being other than via beings themselves the next step is asking a being about its own Being. The one chosen to answer these questions is Dasein. By quantifying a set of characteristics that a being interested in its own existence might have, such as angst and care, Martin reaches the prerequisite of those characteristics which is temporality, because Dasein is mortal. To truly grasp the meaning of his own Being, Dasein must first authentically embrace the fact that it will die. The book ends with questions concerning the nature of temporality itself which were supposed to be answered in the continuation of his project.

This summer I went on vacation for three weeks with my wife and her parents,
to visit the country that invented kung-fu, noodles, silk, and gunpowder. 
China currently has a population of 1.3 billion people with a growing affluent minority
that nearly has the purchasing of the United States.

The country that is now modern China used to be comprised of many different
cultures, languages, and ethnic groups of which Han was the largest.
After the Communist revolution, many elements of the regions were unified,
including a simplified writing system based on Han characters.

Climate ranges from sandy deserts, to frigid tundra and tropical forests.

The fantastic city of Hong Kong is the most vertically built city in the world
and functions as a special administrative region with its own laws and government.
Hong Kong is the home of countless action movies and one of my biggest idols, Bruce Lee.

Another SAR is Macao, which was once a colony of the Portuguese.
It is home to the highest commercial bungee jump in the world at 233 meters.

China is working hard to grow into a new global identity,
but is making sure not to forget the values and culture that has held it together.
This picture is at a space observation temple in the middle of Beijing.

Nearby lies East Chang’an Avenue which crosses the forbidden city and Tian’anmen square.

It was exciting to see China from the inside and I look forward to
visiting it again in the future to see how everything has transformed.

Every year around May, the sun begins showing itself long enough to walk outdoors without a jacket on. Like clockwork, people start to pretend like we live in a tropical country, and go out to soak up as much light as they can. This is because they know what awaits them in a few short months. The summer is very pleasant though, with temperatures between 15 and 25 degrees. About 20% of the year looks like this:

Spring and Fall both show the same characteristics with the temperature hovering around 5 degrees and the sky mostly cloudy. This is what Sweden looks like 50% of the year:

Then comes the winter, where temperatures are constantly below freezing for about 4 months straight. 30% of the year Sweden looks like this:

AAAAAWW    YEEEEEAAH!