Paley’s Computer

(I could’ve sworn I wrote about this earlier, but I can’t find it in the archive now. So sorry if this is a duplicate.)

Let’s say you’re visiting a foreign country, along with a native. As you’re wandering the forest, you see a mechanical watch on the ground. You pick it up, open it, examine its mechanism, and wonder among yourselves how it might have come to be in the forest, who designed it, who manufactured it, and so on.

After walking a bit further, you see a computer in a glade, its LED lit, its fans whirring, its power supply connected to an array of solar panels, its monitor showing a CAD tool with plans for a watch. It says “Dell” on the side.

You ask your guide about this device: who designed it? Who built it? Who decided to install it in the woods, of all places, and why? He says, “It’s always been here. As far as anyone can tell, it’s been here since the beginning of time.”

Satisfied, you nod your head and move on.

This is, of course, ridiculous. A computer is a big complicated thing whose presence demands an explanation, and you can’t get around that just by saying that it’s always been there.

For those who didn’t recognize it, what I’ve done here is to combine two common Christian arguments. The first is Paley’s Watchmaker, which says that a complicated thing requires a complicated designer.

The second adapts the Kalam argument to Paley’s watch. Briefly: the First-Cause Argument says that life/the universe/everything is a big complicated thing that didn’t just happen on its own, and therefore demands an explanation. If everything has a cause, we can ask what caused life, and then ask what caused that, and what caused that, and so forth. Eventually, we’re bound to come to the Ultimate Cause, which has no cause of its own. And hey, let’s call that God because that’s what we’re trying to prove.

At some point, someone realized that if everything has a cause, then it’s fair to ask what caused God, and what caused the thing that caused God, and so forth. So the argument was modified to say that everything that begins to exist has a cause, and BTW God is eternal and therefore never began to exist, and therefore doesn’t require an explanation.

I hope I’ve demonstrated, above, that being eternal is not sufficient for not requiring an explanation. Heck, the four-color theorem, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, Pascal’s last theorem are all eternal, yet they’re all complex entities that demand an explanation. If “it’s eternal, therefore it doesn’t require an explanation” were true, math class would be a lot shorter. In other words, Kalam is basically a very fancy and roundabout way of saying “I don’t need to explain God because shut up is why.”

(Some people might object that I’m casually using “cause” and “explanation” interchangeably. Yes, I am. Because for my purposes, they’re close enough that the distinction doesn’t matter.)

No, what short-circuits the infinite regress of explanations is when we get to something simple enough not to require further explanation. An explanation for Paley’s watch might be “the watch was designed in the same way as a ship’s rigging or a water pump, but smaller, more delicate, and more complicated.

But if “God” is the ultimate simple explanation, perhaps a principle of logic, like “0 = 0”, then that god loses a lot of the attributes that people who want God to exist really want that god to have. Like caring about their welfare. Like being aware of them, or indeed, of the Milky Way galaxy. Like being capable of noticing those sorts of things. Which “0 = 0” doesn’t. I’ve had people tell me that there are arguments to show why the Ultimate Uncaused Cause must necessarily have been a Jewish carpenter who was executed 2000 years ago, but somehow they never got around to presenting these arguments.

In Arkansas, You Can’t Spell “Graduation” Without G-O-D

From KAIT, an ABC affiliate in Jonesboro, AR (via Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, of all places):

It starts out in pretty standard fashion (skip if you’ve seen this before): the Riverside school district has been having prayer at sixth-grade graduation ceremonies for a while. This year, a parent complained, the ACLU sent a letter telling the district what’s what, the district dropped prayer from the school ceremony, and the parents coordinated with area churches to have ceremonies before and/or after the one at the school, complete with prayer and pot-luck lunch.

Ha-ha! Just kidding about that last part. I meant to say that the district decided to be dicks:

LAKE CITY, AR (KAIT)- The Riverside School district has decided not to have a 6th grade graduation this year after a parent protested against prayer during the ceremony.

Local mom Kelly Adams presents the case for allowing prayer:

“As Christians and a mainly Christian town I think, there were a lot of people hurt that our rights were taken away,” Adams said.

“My daughter graduated last year from 6th grade and my son is graduating this year from 6th grade, and we had a pastor open our ceremony and my daughter actually closed the ceremony in prayer,” she said.

So there you go: “We’re in the majority, and we’ve always done it this way. Checkmate, civil-libertistas!”

The current plan is now to pile dickery upon dickery and have the graduation ceremony at a church. Never mind the students and parents who aren’t Christians, because Jesus loves them too. Adams again:

“A lot of the parents, the Christian parents decided to get together and do it at the church,” she said.

“We're not trying to be pushy or ugly to anybody, we just want them to know there is a God who loves them,” she said.

Because when you’re recognizing students’ achievements and ushering them into the next phase of their education, you can’t possibly do that without also proselytizing to everyone. That’s just common sense!

Wait, I think I hear a small voice from the back, some rabbi from way back when:

“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.

That’s cute, but clearly this guy knows nothing about Christianity.

Death of the Desktop

I’m a geek. If you didn’t know this, it’s because you’ve never met me or talked to me for more than five minutes.

I keep reading that the desktop PC is dying: , even as tablet and smartphone sales are rising. One popular theory, then, is that people are doing on their tablets and phones what they used to do on their desktop PCs.

I hope this isn’t the case, because frankly, tablets and phones are crap when it comes to doing real work.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve been using PDAs, and now a smartphone, for well over a decade. I also have an iPad that I use regularly. I also have a Swiss army knife, but while it’s a wonderful tool in a pinch, I’d rather have a real set of tools if they’re available.

The same goes for laptops, tablets, and phones: they’re portable, and that certainly counts for a lot. But size matters, too, and size is intrinsically non-portable.

I’m not terribly picky about keyboards: as long as it’s full-sized (i.e., the keys are roughly the size of my fingers), has arrow keys, function keys, a keypad, and reasonable action (in the piano sense of the word), I’m happy. I know people who swear by the industrial-style IBM keyboards, and while I don’t share their enthusiasm, I get it: not only are they nigh-indestructible, they also have decent springs and make a satisfying “click” noise when you type. When you’ve typed a key, you know it. It’s a small thing, but it makes a difference.

At home, I have a 20-inch monitor, and wouldn’t consider anything smaller. In fact, I wouldn’t mind adding a second one, the way I have at work, to be able to have more windows in front of me.

I see people who resize their browser or spreadsheet or whatever to the full size of the display, and I don’t get it. Half the screen seems ample, and would allow them to see what else is open at the same time. Even worse are people who have a full-screen browser with multiple tabs open. How can they see what’s going on in those other tabs, with the current one blocking their view?

I’m not terribly picky when it comes to mice, though I do prefer a mouse to a trackball or laptop-style trackpad (though I find myself tempted by Apple’s super-sized trackpad). It’s more a matter of dexterity and fine control than anything else. I’m not as good zeroing in on a small button with a trackpad that lies between my thumbs as I am with a mouse that has its own area to the side.

All of these things are relatively minor: they don’t stop me from doing work, they just make it a little easier, a little more pleasant. But then, what makes a workspace pleasant isn’t so much the things it does, as the things it doesn’t do: the annoyances that aren’t there so they don’t get in the way. Not having to look down at my fingers to make sure they’re on the home row. Not clicking on the wrong button by mistake.

But the other thing, the thing that keeps getting me awed reactions about how fast I work, is keybindings. I’ve taken the time to either learn or customize my environment—both the windowing environment and common applications—to be able to do common operations from the keyboard, without having to move my hand all the way to the mouse. Again, I see people who raise their hand, move it over to the mouse, click on the window they want to switch to, then put their hand back on the keyboard. It’s like watching someone with a 1970s-era TV set get up off the couch, turn the station knob on the set, and come back to the couch. You’d want to say “Why don’t you just use the remote?” just as I want to yell “Why don’t you just alt-tab through to the window you want?”

(Also, in both Firefox and Chrome, did you know that you can set up a URL with a keyword, that’ll fill in whatever you type after the keyword? If I want to look up Star Wars at IMDb, I don’t type in eye em dee bee dot com into the browser’s URL bar, then click on the search box and type in the name. I just type “imdb Star Wars” into the URL bar, and the browser replaces that with “http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=Star%20Wars”. Try it with images.google.com, Wikipedia, or Bible Gateway and see how convenient it is.)

Yes, these things only take a few seconds each. But a few seconds here, a few seconds there, and it all eventually adds up to significant time.

So when I hear it suggested that people are abandoning desktop machines for portable ones, what I hear is that people are switching from dedicated workspaces where you can get stuff done comfortably, to something fundamentally inferior.

In principle, there’s no reason why a portable device running, say, Android, couldn’t be as flexible and configurable as a Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris box running X11/KDE/GNOME/what have you. But in practice, they’re not. Whether it’s a matter of limiting the configurability to simplify development, or the fact that Android apps are sandboxed and can’t talk to each other, or something else, I don’t know. But the fact is that right now, I couldn’t bind “shake the phone up and down” to mean “create a new appointment in the calendar” if I wanted to.

And then comes along something like Ubuntu’s Unity, which aims to be a common UI for both desktop and portable devices. Which is to say, it aims to strip down the desktop to allow only those things that are convenient on tablets.

That’s taking away configurability; it’s simplification that makes it harder to get work done, and that annoys me.

UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.
—Doug Gwyn

Bigoted Amendment Is Bigoted

Today, according to the Dallas Morning News, Greg Abbott, the Attorney General of Texas ruled that

Domestic partners can’t receive health benefits from counties, cities or school districts because doing so defies Texas law on traditional marriage, Attorney General Greg Abbott said in an opinion made public Monday.

This fuckery was made possible by Texas’s 2005 amendment to its constitution that said that

This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.

(Others have already pointed out that marriage is identical to itself, and therefore this amendment bans one-man-one-woman marriage. Go read them for yucks, then come back.)

A Dallas Fort Worth CBS affiliate writes:

Tea party-backed state Sen. Dan Patrick of Houston asked Abbott, a fellow Republican, to review the matter in November. […]

In a statement, Patrick said the measure, known as the Marriage Amendment, was passed by “an overwhelming majority of the Texas Legislature and ratified by more than 75 percent of Texas voters.

“This opinion clearly outlines that cities, counties and school districts cannot subvert the will of Texans,” Patrick said.

At first I thought that maybe AG Abbott’s hands were tied: after all, the 2005 amendment is—and by all appearances was always intended as—a big ol’ fuck-you to the gay community. As much “we don’ like your kind ’round here” as they could get away with. In which case the AG may not have had a lot of legal leeway.

At the same time, he could have said, “Look, the Supreme Court is expected to rule on DOMA in the near future. Depending how they rule, the 14th Amendment might come into play and invalidate Proposition 2. So let’s wait and see.” But he didn’t. Presumably either because he prefers the conclusion he came to, or because he thinks the Texas constitution is so clear that it doesn’t matter how SCOTUS rules.

At any rate, it looks as though an amendment introduced to make doubly sure that only straight people get to enjoy the benefits of marriage—it’s a well-known principle that what makes a thing enjoyable is knowing that someone else can’t have it, right?—is working as expected. Congratulations, Texas! Just don’t come whining when you’re not allowed to change voting laws without getting an okay from the feds because you have a history of discrimination, okay?

Christians Are Better than Their Religion

I had a lengthy discussion with one Nathanael Brown. (I’m sorry that the discussion is disordered, that you have to read it bottom to top, and there isn’t good threading. Blame Twitter.) Since this started in the context of demonstrations on the National Mall, both for and against, about whether the Bible’s rules about marriage and divorce should be written into US law.

He allowed that US law is not the same as God’s law, but with a caveat:

So I used Jeff Dee’s approach and asked what that meant: specifically, whether this was a threat, and what will happen to me after I die if I don’t accept Jesus. Would I be sent to hell, and would there be suffering?

He was very reluctant to answer directly:

I kept asking, and he kept ducking the question, hiding behind such fig leaves as Bible quotations and

and

In short, Nathanael came across as very reluctant to either face up to the ugly side of his belief, or either defend or condemn the “worship or burn” system. The closest he came was when asked why he’s not condemning God’s threat, when he’d surely condemn a mugger’s “your money or your life”:

I’m pretty sure that at some level, he recognizes that some Christian beliefs are immoral: that it’s not right to torture people, especially forever, especially for a “crime” as minor as not believing in a god for which there’s no good evidence. That just ain’t right. But at the same time, I’m guessing that he’s been brought up to believe that you’re supposed to believe these things, and to believe that they’re good; that you’re not supposed to question God or the Bible, and you’re certainly not supposed to think any of it is wrong.

This is the sort of thinking that leads people to defend genocide, and I can only hope that Nathanael eventually grows out of his mental prison and starts examining his beliefs honestly and critically.

I’m convinced that he’s better than his god, as are the vast majority of Christians. But he just won’t let himself realize that.

What If You Meet God When You’re in Trouble?

I was recently asked, what if I got in an accident, and while I was lying in the emergency room, I saw God. Or what if a loved one got hit by a bus, and God appeared while I was waiting for the ambulance to show up. Would I believe in God then?

I might. But it would be for the wrong reasons.

Basically, this is a variant on “There are no atheists in foxholes“, in that it’s a type of conversion that occurs when one is in trouble.

The thing is, I want to know the truth about whether there are any gods. Which is to say, I want to have good reasons for what I believe on the topic. But what it boils down to is, how can I figure out whether a given proposition is likely to be true or not?

So the “will you believe when you’re in trouble?” argument is “Oh, sure, you don’t believe in God now when you’re in your right mind and thinking straight. But what if you get a revelation while you’re stressed, harried, and/or aren’t getting enough oxygen to the brain? Then would you believe?” I don’t think I need to point out the flaws in this argument, when it’s put this way.

I mean, if I suddenly started hearing the voice of God, I like to think that I’d go to a psychiatrist to see whether a dose of Thorazine can make him shut up: the simplest explanation for my hearing voices would be schizophrenia, not the all-powerful ruler of the cosmos taking a sudden interest in my life.

But what if God exists, and only appears to people in dire need? In that case, I might not be thinking straight at the time of the revelation, but I could still look back on the events afterwards and see whether I still have good reason to believe that the god I met was real. If all I got from the vision of god was platitudes like “it’ll be okay”, the simplest explanation would be that I hallucinated the event, perhaps from stress. That goes double if the god didn’t speak in audible syllables, but were simply a wordless voice in my head.

But okay, what if God gave me verifiable information that I couldn’t have come up with on my own, like “your girlfriend’s been shot; she has a .22 caliber bullet lodged between her third and fourth lumbar vertebrae, on the dorsal side”? (Feel free to come up with a better example.)

For one thing, I’d want hard evidence that this is really what happened. Human memory is notoriously unreliable; I’d trust video recordings and photos a lot more than my recollection. I’d want to see video of me telling the EMTs in the ambulance that there’s a bullet lodged between the third and fourth lumbar vertebrae, or at least an EMT report with “bystander says that…”, followed by X-rays or a doctor’s report that confirms what I said. The more specific the “diagnosis” from revelation, the better. Of course, even if we could establish that I somehow received information through mysterious channels, that still wouldn’t establish that it was a god who gave it to me (as opposed to, say, telepathic aliens, or whoever’s monitoring the Matrix-like world that I inhabit).

But if, after a few years, I started telling the story of how God told me where the bullet was, and I told the EMTs, the simplest explanation would be that I was misremembering: perhaps “God” had simply told me that “it’s going to be okay”; then at the hospital I saw the X-rays showing the bullet; and after a few years, my mind conflated the two events to make the event seem more astounding than it was.

Now, some people may say, “well, if you demand that much evidence, then of course you’re never going to believe in God!” But I don’t think I’m being unreasonable. I bet that a lot of the people making this complaint wouldn’t believe in unicorns just because they saw one at a time of stress. And say what you will about unicorns, but they’re more plausible than gods, since they don’t violate the laws of physics.

So really this last argument comes down to “I can’t muster the evidence that would convince you, so you need to lower your standards, because you really ought to believe in God.” Sorry, but no. I try to keep an open mind, but as the saying goes, if your mind is too open, people will stuff it full of garbage.

Flaming Telephone

(Note to people reading this in a future when they’ve grown up never using a telephone for voice communication with another human: we used to have a game where a message would be distorted by serial whispering, and we found this amusing.)

So apparently Thomas Nagel, who’s an honest-to-Cthulhu serious philosopher, published a book last year called Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False“.

Here’s what Brian Leiter and Michael Weisber wrote in their review in the Nation, on Oct. 3:

Nagel now enters the fray with a far-reaching broadside against Darwin and materialism worthy of the true-believing Plantinga (whom Nagel cites favorably). We suspect that philosophers—even philosophers sympathetic to some of Nagel’s concerns—will be disappointed by the actual quality of the argument.

Here’s how Steven Pinker linked to Leiter and Weisber’s review, on Oct. 16:

Here’s how the New Republic reported Pinker’s tweet on Mar. 8 (five months after Pinker tweeted):

[…] Steven Pinker took to Twitter and haughtily ruled that it was “the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker.” Fuck him, he explained.

And here’s how Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent links to the New Republic, today:

The New Republic reports that Pinker has taken to cyberspace to stir up the Darwinist mob against Nagel. Every whiff of heresy against the true faith must be ruthlessly stamped out. Torquemada had his Auto-da-fé. Pinker has his Twitter account.

With journamalism of this caliber, I wouldn’t be surprised if UD responded to this post by saying that I set babies on fire. After eating them.

But remember: it’s the atheists and Darwiniacs who are “shrill” and “strident”.

The Selectively-True Scotsman

BillDo has been on a tear lately against surveys, seeing as how a few of them have been released lately showing that as it turns out, the Catholic rank and file are nowhere near as reactionary as the funny-hatted hierarchy, or as he would like.

I suppose he could have just pointed out that the Catholic church is not a democracy so sit down, shut up, and let the higher-ups tell you what God wants, but I suppose even he realizes that won’t go over well in the 21st century. So instead, he points out the differences between people who attend church services regularly and those who don’t. I guess this is like saying swing voters are more favorable to immigration reform and gay rights than people who consistently vote straight-ticket Republican, and therefore the GOP needs to double down on its anti-gay plaform planks to remain relevant. Or, to put it another way, I don’t know what his reasoning is.

At any rate, it’s clear that he doesn’t care for self-identified Catholics who don’t go to church every Sunday:

Whether someone who “attends Mass a few times a year or never” can be considered Catholic is debatable

(from here)

This takes on added significance when we consider that 4 in 10 of the Catholics sampled do not practice their religion (28 percent go to church “a few times a year” and 11 percent say they “never” attend). That these nominal Catholics are precisely the biggest fans of gay marriage is a sure bet, though the poll fails to disclose the results.

(from here.)

So take note, Christmas-and-Easter Catholics: you’re not true Scotsmen Catholics.

But wait, what’s this?

Catholics make up anywhere between 70 and 78 million Americans

70-78 million out of a population of 315 million is 22-25%, well in line with other surveys of American religion that I’ve seen. But shouldn’t BillDo’s number be 40% lower than mainstream pollsters’, since he doesn’t consider infrequent mass-goers to be True Catholics™?

Surely this can’t mean that he’s happy to count mere “nominal Catholics” when he wants to show off the size of his tribe. We know this can’t be the case because hypocrisy makes Baby Jesus cry. So there must be some other explanation, like anti-Catholic bias among pollsters or something.

Update, Mar. 25, 2013: Carmelita Spats tells me how she tried, and failed, to be excommunicated from the Catholic church, on the grounds that a) she’s an atheist, and b) she had an abortion. But apparently even that’s not enough to be taken off the rolls.

Da da da

Today is National Grammar Day, but rather than rail against common misuses of the English language like the insufferable language snob that I am, I thought I’d mention a peculiarity of language that I happened to notice.

The German word “da” means “there”, as in “Mein Bier ist da” — “My beer is right here”. In this sense, it refers to a location.

But in certain other combinations, it refers to a noun: “dagegen” means “against it” or “in contrast to it”. It literally means “that-against”. “Dafür” means “for it”.

So sometimes “da” refers to a location, and in at other times it refers to a “thing”. I put “thing” in scare-quotes because the object that a da-compound word refers to need not be an object made of atoms: one of the examples linked to above is “Haben Sie etwas dagegen, wenn ich rauche?” — “Do you mind if I smoke?”. Smoking is an activity, not an object, but our minds still treat it in many ways as an honorary object.

In fact, I can imagine an evolution of language in which “da” started out referring to a location, perhaps a location being pointed to, later came to also represent the thing in the location being pointed to, and eventually came to encompass honorary nouns.

But before we go pointing fingers at those silly Germans da, it’s worth pointing out that “there” — the English word for “da” — is similarly schizophrenic: it usually refers to a location, as in “I live in that house there”, but sometimes, in combinations, it refers to the same kind of “thing” as in German: “therefore”, “thereof”, “therewith”, and so forth.

In fact, the most common English example of this location/thing oddity is “wherefore”, in Romeo and Juliet, when Juliet says, “O Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?”.

“Wherefore” has “where” in it, which makes people think Juliet’s wondering about Romeo’s location. But actually it means “why” or “for what reason”. She’s asking why Romeo is Romeo, as in “of all the guys I could have fallen for, why did it have to be Romeo?”

Okay, so I couldn’t help myself and snuck in some grammar-railing there at the end. I warned you I was a snob.

I Am Chase and/or Sanborn

Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Intuition Pump

So the other day, I found myself inside a philosophical intuition pump. But first, a bit of background:

Qualia (singular quale), in philosophy, are basically the sense of perceiving something. If you’ve ever had that discussion about “how do I know that what you see as red is what I see as red?” or “what’s it like to be someone who actually enjoys Brussels sprouts?”, then you’ve thought about qualia.

Daniel Dennett wrote Quining Qualia, a paper that argues against qualia, or at least against the notion that they’re a useful concept. In it, he introduces several intuition pumps, analogies intended to help us wrap our minds around the problem. One of them is:

Intuition pump #7: Chase and Sanborn. Once upon a time there were two coffee tasters, Mr. Chase and Mr. Sanborn, who worked for Maxwell House […] Along with half a dozen other coffee tasters, their job was to ensure that the taste of Maxwell House stayed constant, year after year. One day, about six years after Mr. Chase had come to work for Maxwell House, he confessed to Mr. Sanborn:

I hate to admit it, but I’m not enjoying this work anymore. When I came to Maxwell House six years ago, I thought Maxwell House coffee was the best-tasting coffee in the world. I was proud to have a share in the responsibility for preserving that flavor over the years. And we’ve done our job well; the coffee tastes just the same today as it tasted when I arrived. But, you know, I no longer like it! My tastes have changed. I’ve become a more sophisticated coffee drinker. I no longer like that taste at all.

Sanborn greeted this revelation with considerable interest. “It’s funny you should mention it, ” he replied, “for something rather similar has happened to me.” He went on:

When I arrived here, shortly before you did, I, like you, thought Maxwell House coffee was tops in flavor. And now I, like you, really don’t care for the coffee we’re making. But my tastes haven’t changed; my . . .tasters have changed. That is, I think something has gone wrong with my taste buds or some other part of my taste-analyzing perceptual machinery. Maxwell House coffee doesn’t taste to me the way it used to taste; if only it did, I’d still love it, for I still think that taste is the best taste in coffee. Now I’m not saying we haven’t done our job well. You other tasters all agree that the taste is the same, and I must admit that on a day-to-day basis I can detect no change either. So it must be my problem alone. I guess I’m no longer cut out for this work.

Chase and Sanborn are alike in one way at least: they both used to like Maxwell House coffee, and now neither likes it. But they claim to be different in another way. Maxwell House tastes to Chase just the way it always did, but not so for Sanborn. But can we take their protestations at face value? Must we? Might one or both of them simply be wrong? Might their predicaments be importantly the same and their apparent disagreement more a difference in manner of expression than in experiential or psy chological state? Since both of them make claims that depend on the reliability of their memories, is there any way to check on this reliability?

So the other evening, I opened a bottle of riesling and poured myself a glass. It was quite good, [insert a bunch of pretentious oenological terms like “fruity” and “bouquet”]. I recapped the bottle and put it back in the fridge.

The next evening, I opened the bottle and poured myself a second glass. But this time, it tasted distinctly more sour than I remembered it.

My first thought was “Well, crap. This means that I have to either drink a whole bottle in one sitting, or pay $12 for one glass of wine.” But I asked frequent Epsilon Clue commenter Fez, who knows more about wine than I do, and he said that my story didn’t match his experience; that he’ll often recork an opened bottle and drink it the next day.

So now I’m not sure what’s going on. It’s possible that this particular bottle went sour overnight. Maybe reds last longer than whites. Maybe whatever I had for dinner those two nights affected my taste buds. Maybe something else.

But what’s interesting to me is that what was originally intended as a hypothetical example to make a philosophical point has become more concrete and personal for me, with literally tens of dollars at stake.