Getting philosophical

One of the great debates in philosophy is that of free will vs. determinism. I've been thinking about it for a while, and I've decided that I don't think free will exists. Or at least, I don't think I have it.

When I think about where I am in life and how I got there, I come to the inevitable conclusion that I didn't have any choice in the matter. It chose me. All I did was what came naturally. A lot of times I even had strong opinions about the "decisions" I "made": for example, when I was taking engineering physics, I was of the strong opinion that I should quit it and do something else, but I didn't. What I thought had little bearing; I did what I did, and it was as if I was sucked into the choice by some invisible force outside of my control. This is just one example. There are countless others. My whole life I feel like I haven't been choosing my path, I've been pulled along it.

I've thought of this before, but the reason I decided to write it down now was that just a minute ago I ate a bag of microwave popcorn. It had been left in my apartment a month ago by the guy I'm subletting from, and I had been given instructions to eat it if I wanted. Today I "decided" to make it. Okay, nothing unusual about that. But then when started eating it, all I could think was This is too salty....It's gross! I don't want to eat it. But I ate it anyway. Meanwhile, if I had the choice I would be studying right now, but I'm not. Fate.

Of course, the other possibility is that I'm just weak-willed and tend to just take the easiest option. Thinking about it, there are actually two things in my life that I've done that I can difinitively say I chose to do against my nature. I won't go into detail about what they were, but they were the two hardest things I've ever done. It was as if I was using every fibre of my being to rip myself away from the icy grasp of fate. Neither of those things actually ended up affecting my life in any way. Coincidence? Not sure.

People always rag on determinism as a philosophy because it's not very practical. You can't live your life as if you're a determinist, because then you can justify anything. How can you punish a person for a crime if they were destined to commit it? The answer I always have for that is that you were destined to punish them. So despite everything I just said, I'm going to stick to free-willism as my official stance. Because if I'm right, I'm right, and if I'm wrong, it's not my fault, now is it?

Links

• The Journal published a very good editorial about Homecoming, saying pretty much the same thing I said.
• Scientists have recently observed the first adult giant squid in the wild. Awesome!
• Interested in Japan? Here you can find everything there is to know about this land of contrasts.

Music: Iron & Wine - Woman King EP

Homecoming

This weekend, I was back in Kingston for Queen's homecoming. Normally this is the biggest party in town, but it ended up being a pretty chill weekend for me because my girlfriend broke a bone in her foot, so I ended up spending Friday night at Kingston General Hospital with her. She couldn't walk on Saturday, so I just had a pretty chill night with some of my friends who were also up for the weekend. As chill as my weekend was, everyone else in the vicinity of Queen's made up for it.

The usual homecoming party on Aberdeen Street turned into a riot this year (CTV, Whig Standard). The party has been steadily growing in destructiveness for the last few years, but this year was something else--we're talking cars turned over and set on fire. Okay, well one car. Fortunately only one person was dumb enough to leave their car on Aberdeen Street the night of Homecoming.

The city and the university had tried their best to alleviate the problem this year with a free concert, a strong police presence, and letters sent out to everyone in the area warning about bylaw enforcement. I will now outline why this was the stupidest plan ever:

First off, if you're going to try and keep people away from Aberdeen with a free concert, make sure it's actually free. The concert was only free for students, first of all; anyone else (alumni, guests, etc.) had to pay. Second, the tickets weren't as readily available as they should have been; I tried to get one, for example, but the box office was closed all day Saturday! Third, it was too early in the night; at best it would have delayed things. Fourth, it never would have worked anyway.

Here's the thing about Queen's students: they're smart people, they're generally good, responsible people. But they like to party. They like to drink. There is a strong tradition of drinking. They also don't like being told what to do. So people are going to get drunk at Homecoming, and there's nothing the police can do.

Fortunately, drunken students are not the problem, at least not directly. The problem is people who do other stupid things, like throw beer bottles and turn over cars. The city and the university and the Kingston Police seems to think that these are the consequences of drunkenness. They're completely out of touch.

Here's why the riot happened this year. First of all, the cops' dilligence in shutting down keg parties had an important but unwanted effect: it meant that a lot of people who would have been in someone's house drinking were out on the street drinking. This is not inherently a problem. Secondly, the police were basically searching everyone they saw and writing loads of tickets. The result of this was that the police were extremely resented and no one wanted anything to do with them. More than a few people were hurling insults at the police for this reason before any of the serious shit happened.

Eventually, a critical mass of people was reached, at which point everyone collectively realized that, outnumbered 50 to one, the police couldn't stop everyone from drinking in the street, and so everyone rushed into the street. That was it; nothing they could have done after that. The police blocked off Aberdeen in a pathetic attempt to stop the party from growing. Of course, the students all know the area much better than the police do (students walk, police only drive), so it was little effort to get to the party via someone's backyard. The police kept giving people a hard time, arrested a few people and whatnot, but they wouldn't dare go into the crowd. The partygoers had fought the law and won.

The result was that when the serious rioting started--not public drinking but fireworks being set off into trees and stop signs being ripped down--there was nothing the police could do about it. It was a bit like the American Revolution, really: the police were like the British, the students like the colonists who were sick of British taxation, and the few rioters were like the founding fathers who took it all as an excuse to set up a quasi-fundamentalist state which would allow them to set themselves up as a new kind of legitimized tyrants that no one really wanted. Well, maybe that last part is a stretch, but no one wanted a riot to break out. They wanted to drink on the street in peace and be protected from the crazy few.

So I blame the police's strongarm tactics for allowing a drunken street party to turn into a riot, and, by doing so, endangering hundreds of Queen's students, not to mention property.

Here's my suggestion for what they should have done to prevent the chaos that occurred:

Instead of sending out flyers saying that certain bylaws were going to be rigorously enforced, they should have sent out flyers saying that certain bylaws were not going to be enforced at all. No tickets for public drinking. No keggers being shut down. Once you've made that clear, then you send out lots of police officers onto the street. You ignore the relatively harmless partying, but you make sure you're there in case a car gets set on fire. If you're not giving a hard time to those who are merely drunk and not causing a problem (which is 99% of people), and maybe if you're not wearing flak jackets and weilding batons, you might be allowed to walk through the crowds on Aberdeen! Then when someone gets hurt, you can help them. When someone is doing something dangerous or destructive, you can stop them. Better yet, you'll dissuade them from doing it in the first place.

Of course, after the strong-armed debacle this year, I wonder if anyone could ever trust the police again. Kingston is like any other student town; the town tries to make the students live peacefully in the town, while the students just want to be students but have virtually no control over the government. The result is that cops are almost always viewed with extreme suspicion in the ghetto.

And then of course there's the real reason this will never happen: the police and the city are too bone-headed to think outside the box. Let students be students? Nah, students are the problem!

Edit: Also note that that at Queen's, a university with remarkably few black students, it is a black student who appears standing on top of the overturned car in the photo from the Whig article. Just thought that was scandalous enough to make note of.

McGill and Queen's: A Comparison

I've nearly finished three weeks of classes now, here at McGill University. In many ways, McGill is very similar to my alma mater, Queen's. There are a few differences, however.

The biggest difference, obviously, is their location. McGill is in downtown Montreal, a bustling city of two million, while Queen's is in downtown Kingston, a city of 100,000 that many consider to be a university town. (I, being a long-time Kingston resident, know this isn't true; we're also a prison town!) To be perfectly honest, I'm still a bit undecided about which I prefer. Kingston had everything a university student could need, really. And while I'm sure that Montreal offers an immense spectrum of opportunities that don't exist in Kingston, the fact that 2/3 of the population speaks French and I don't makes me feel like I'm missing out. This leads me to the thing I keep saying to people: "Moving to Montreal seemed like a really good idea, until I got here and realized that all my friends had moved to Toronto."

Now off the topic of cities and back on to pure university discussion. McGill, like Queen's, has a mixture of beautiful old buildings, ugly concrete monstrosities built in the mid-20^th century, and somewhat nicer ones built more recently. The difference is that at Queen's, you can actually see the architecture, while at McGill, all the buildings are so close together that you really can't. Queen's has a good number of open spaces and broad streets (University Avenue, Union Street, Kingston Field, Summerhill, etc.) while McGill has few. Ironically, one of McGill's few large open spaces, Rutherford Park, faces onto the ugly backs of some buildings and is completely underutilized. Point for Queen's.

On a side note, one interesting thing is that Queen's has a University Avenue and a Union Street that are perpendicular, while McGill has a University Street and a Union Avenue that are parallel.

Famous characters: McGill has Ernest Rutherford, Nobel Prize-winning physicist. Point for McGill. They also have William Shatner, Captain of the Starship Enterprise. Point for Queen's. Queen's has no one super famous.

Professors: I suppose it's difficult to compare, since I only have three courses here. Interestingly though, it seems like the same rule applies here as at Queen's: computer science profs are really cool, while electrical engineering profs are really....well, the words "60 year old virgins" come to mind, actually. Also, they're really uptight about stupid annoying things, like insisting that your assignments be written in LaTeX on Unix machines. Oh, how I hate LaTeX! Fortunately, none of this applies to my supervisor, who is bitchin'.

Administration-wise: Queen's has McGill licked here, I think. Or is it just that after four years at Queen's I'd just really figured out the system? Hard to say, I guess. One thing for sure is, Queen's bookstore is better than McGill's, but McGill's computer store is WAY better than Queen's.

Course-wise: after the three-year ordeal that was engineering physics, I think I expected graduate school to be a bit of a breeze. At least, I thought, I'd enjoy it. And I think I would be ejoying it, except for (a) I made the mistake of taking that stupid DSP course, and (b) the above-mentioned LaTeX analities. Make no mistake though: the workload ain't light. In fact, I'm reminded of second year, when every class seemed to have an assignment every week. Fortunately I'm only taking three courses, because the assignments are a lot harder now, and I don't have a stable of eng phys buddies to blast off if the going gets rough, plus now I'm starting to get onto some research a bit, which could potentially suck up all my free time.

It's also a little weird: I used to be the computer nerd among the physics nerds; now I suddenly find that I'm the physics nerd among the computer nerds.

Conclusion: I can't wait until this weekend. It's homecoming, and I'm coming home for it! It's gonna feel so good to don my GPA, get drunk at 9 AM, then walk around nice, peaceful Kingston where everyone speaks English and knows how to drive.

I've finally found the religion that's right for me

I'm going to become a Pastafarian. I especially like the part about how I'm expected to dress up as a pirate in order to prevent global warming.

The opportunity of a century

I've been busy with school and stuff all week, but I've come up with a bunch of things I want to blog about. For one, I've been reading a lot about what's going on down in Louisianna in the aftermath of Katrina. Sure, it's been another leadership disaster from the U.S. government, leading to terrible human suffering, but I'm not going to talk about that because coming up with reasons to criticize the Bush regime is like shooting fish in a barrel. Katrina is a human tragedy, yes, but it's also an economic disaster which is likely to have far-flung consequences. The cost of rebuilding New Orleans is expected to be more than the cost of the war in Iraq. The sheer scale of the cleanup necessary is overwhelming. The environmental damage is catastrophic.

But here's the good news: this may be the first opportunity in post-industrial western history for a city the size of New Orleans to be built basically from scratch. With the exception of a few elevated regions which sustained only minor damage (including the historic French Quarter), the city will need to be completely torn down and rebuilt. Sure, it's always been possible for a civilization to intentionally build a city from scratch (Brasil's capital Brasilia is one such city), but there is rarely the motivation to do so. Most large-scale urban redesign takes place after catastrophes; for example, after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the city was rebuild using the most modern techniques of urban design for the day, as was London after its Great Fire in 1666.

Wouldn't it be great if New Orleans was rebuilt according to New Urbanist principles? Just imagine: a city based around public transportation, a pleasant, walkable community with little or no car traffic, lots of public space, and no suburban sprawl. A city that is densely populated, but lacks the skyscrapers, high-rises and slums typical of big cities. Doesn't it sound utopian? There's no good reason why it couldn't be that way.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of bad reasons why it isn't going to be that way, especially if the Republicans win the next election. First of all, this whole rebuilding thing is going to be expensive, and I predict it's going to happen during a time when the U.S. doesn't have a lot of extra cash to throw around; as a result, the cheapest option is the most likely. Furthermore, well-designed communities are not good for oil company profits, and what's bad for big oil is bad for the Republicans, at least as far as campaign finances go. I fear that my utopian dream is just that, and the powers that be will prevent it from happening because it doesn't benefit them. *Sigh*

Music: Cuff the Duke - s/t

New Software

This week has been great for new software: iTunes 5.0, Gnome 2.12, and Google Desktop Search 2.0 beta have all been released!

Music: Of Montreal - Cherry Peel

Amazing science

These are possibly the two most amazing science-thingies of the year, and they were both on Slashdot only about five hours apart!

• A mouse that can regenerate almost any tissue, including regrowing limbs and organs
• A computer algorithm that can learn languages

They both sound too good to be true. There isn't some kind of new April-Fool's-Day-in-September thing that no one has told me about, is there?

Back to School

Somebody must have read my post yesterday, because the price of gasoline today was $1.34 per litre here in Montréal. That's about 30% higher than it was just a week ago, and double what it was around two years ago. Good thing I don't have a car!

Today was my first day of class. The great thing about being a graduate student is that you don't have to take many classes. I'm only in three. In fact, four three days out of five I only have one class a day, and only two on the other day two. The courses I'm taking are:

• ECSE 512 - Digital Signal Processing
• ECSE 529 - Image Processing & Communication
• COMP 644 - Pattern Recognition

I sort of got boned because most of the courses I really want to take are only offered in the winter term. The image processing course I basically have to take. The pattern recognition course was one of those that I would have liked to have taken, but probably wouldn't have made the list if I wasn't so constrained. The DSP course is the only one I'm really reluctant to take, because although I concede that it is probably useful for what I'm doing, I haven't exactly had a fun time with systems analysis courses so far. Of course, that may be because of the two signals profs I've had so far, one could barely speak English and the other one I think must have lost his personality in some kind of wager with the devil. Fortunately this time, the prof (Dr. Kabal--not sure if it's pronounced like Cable, which would be really appropriate for an electrical engineering prof, or like Cabal, which would just be cool) seems really cool, and now it's gotten to the stage where you can actually use the two courses worth of theory to do useful things. I mean, not that the Queen's physics department wasn't able to teach me to do useful things with systems analysis in about three hours, but now I'll be getting the full version.

Music: Beck - Guero