Join Me in the Fast Lane

Yes, I'm that guy. You're on the highway, approaching a clearly marked construction zone that is going to require that everyone in the two left lanes will have to merge with each other. Per social contract, you move over into the lane that will survive the interchange... and come to a screeching halt. After a few moments of creeping along, someone comes zipping down the vacant left lane, bypassing everyone already who's gotten over, and they breeze along until the barrels force them to finally merge.

Well, that's me. And after you hear my argument as to why I do that, I'm hoping that you all will join me.

Let's kick things off by considering what highways are for. Our great nation has developed a colossal system of roads, from two to five lanes across in each direction, that can (theoretically) take us from one coast to the other, and just about anywhere else in between, without stopping. They're designed to get us all from where we are to where we need to be, as quickly and efficiently as possible.

So, when a portion of that road is blocked, and that efficiency necessarily diminished, why do we then feel the need to make the situation even worse?

Think about it: the most efficient way to keep things moving is for we people to -- within reason -- maintain their speed and utilize all the available road. If you pull over before it's necessary to, you're doing two things wrong. First of all, merely by changing lanes you're making the back-up twice as long as it needs to be. That's just math. If everyone gets over, you're filling one lane with two lanes' worth of cars. Secondly, it's an established fact that most traffic back-ups are caused (or at least made worse) by people either hitting their brakes or changing lanes. And chances are that if you have to figure out where and how you're going to get over, you're doing both of these. This usually causes the person behind you to slow down, and as things progress further back, it's more likely that the next person will have to hit their brakes harder because they don't see the situation that created the need. That's how you end up with standstills.

Now, given that there's inevitably going to be some slowdown as everyone combines lanes, wouldn't the best way to minimize that be having it occur in a pre-specified place? Like the place where the road actually runs out? Some of the scariest traffic situations I've ever seen have been caused by people just starting to realize that everyone else is getting over, so they hit their brakes and try to find a way in, so as not to break the aforementioned social contract, endangering everyone behind them with their seemingly random activity. All this jockeying and tentative "Can I go? Are you letting me over, or do you not see me?" is what creates far more problems than it solves.

So, by getting over "when you're supposed to", which I'm sure varies greatly depending on the situation (but you're intuitively supposed to know anyway), you're actually making the situation *at* *minimum* twice as bad as it needs to be. To me, there's nothing more ridiculous than a line of creeping traffic that is totally ignoring the *completely* *usable* *lane* right alongside it. We're all trying to get where we're going. Let's make the most of what we have to work with to get this to happen.

Believe me, I've completely turned around on this issue from how I used to be. I once was one of the drivers who cursed those who -- in my mind -- thought they were better than everyone else and didn't have to get over until the last second. I likened it to line-cutting, which in my mind is one of the most heinous crimes of modern life. But I've had a lot of time to think about it during the 60 miles a day I've driven to and from my job for the last year. And when you get down to the logic of it, the way we are "supposed" to handle situations like this doesn't make sense.

Say you're standing in line at the grocery store, ready to check out. There are two lanes open, but people are only using one. It's not a matter of the lane just having opened... the register is just open, the cashier standing there idle. Everyone in line for the other register sees this, but still don't get over. How much reluctance would you have in moving over and using that other register?

But still, the social contract persists against logic. I've had people honk at me as I go by -- clearly not because they think it will do anything, just from self-righteous frustration -- and then there are semi trucks that will take it upon themselves to police the closing lane, pulling into it and slowing down to the speed of the clogged lane. This is actually a step up from what usually happens, because people seem to be willing to stay in the closing lane as long as they're not first. Hooray, we're suddenly we're using two lanes again!

Look, we're all just trying to make getting from A to B as small a piece of our day as necessary. There are roads out there designed to help us do just that. But when we start imposing illogical rules on ourselves for using them efficiently, we're just slowing ourselves and everyone else down. So come into the fast lane with me. Let's keep things a-rollin', folks.

Viva La Punctuacion!

I keep coming across a quote by Kurt Vonnegut in which he professes his hatred for semicolons. He calls them "... transvestite hermaphrodites, representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college." Now, as much as I enjoy and respect Kurt's work, on this he couldn't be more wrong. Not just about semicolons either; I think our whole palette of English punctuation is horribly underused. Like most aspects of English, I think people will avoid using a word or punctuation mark rather than run the risk of using it incorrectly. As a result, we end up with one of the most expressive languages on Earth that uses basically only four punctuation marks (,.?!). I say that we should do the exact opposite of what Mr. Vonnegut proposes and use *more* punctuation.

I understand the reluctance to do this. I always point it out when someone uses a word incorrectly in the grammatical sense, and it makes me physically angry when public signs use "'s" to pluralize something, or when people use double quotes when they really just mean to emphasize what they're saying. But if no one uses semicolons, colons, dashes, ellipses, and the aforementioned parentheses out of fear, what will become of them?

There's a balance that people try to strike when they write, a kind of uneasy, simultaneous allegiance to both the way people talk and the way people think. Looking back as recently as Victorian fiction, you can see how ornate the sentences are, running on, changing direction, nesting ideas inside of other ideas. I've always admired that kind of structure. They actually use the shape of the language to add to the feel of what they're saying. Paragraphs about a summer in the country can meander like a river, or a tense encounter can look as clipped on the page as it should sound.

The era where brevity is the most important thing, I think, started with the Gettysburg Address. I've read that the reason it's such a famous speech is because of the way its words are laid out. Up until that fateful day, public speeches were constructed the same as if they were meant to be read, overblown and stuffed with filler. The attitude was that sheer volume added value (or at the least the illusion of value) to the ideas contained in it. Among all the other speakers that day near a battlefield in Pennsylvania, Abraham Lincoln stepped up and gave an almost unbelievably short speech, his ideas neatly parsed out in short sentences, clear and to the point. It caught the ear, emotive and succinct, easily memorizable, and that's why we still remember what he said that day. It was the first step in an evolution that has led us, for better or worse, to the era of the sound bite.

Today, this derivative, journalistic bent has crept even into everyday fiction. The prevailing opinion is that you should walk away from the page knowing everything there is to know. It all has to be explicitly there on the page, no ambiguity or subtlety added. I blame Hemingway for popularizing this style, and James Patterson for perpetuating it in his endless parade of thrillers with half-empty pages in each 500-word-chapter.

I'm much of the mind that we need to retain a place in our psyches for old-style, more long form sentences. But we also need to infuse it with the energy and immediacy of the words that we type with our thumbs. In order to do this, we need every punctuation mark at our disposal. This is why I wonder what Vonnegut was thinking when he disparaged semicolons. He apparently didn't know what to do with them, but they add a layer of subtext that you then don't have to convey with the words themselves. Here's what I do with all these wonderful, various marks:

Semicolons: I use these when what I'm about to say explains what I just said, but I don't want to put them in separate sentences because they're so closely related. "When I was a child, I was constantly climbing trees; I couldn't get enough of feeling the cooler, higher air on my face." Isn't that so much better than splitting these two related ideas apart? If you didn't, you'd think that the writer would get the same feeling by opening up a third-story window. But no, there's something about the fact that he's specifically climbing a tree that makes you think about it differently. A semicolon has a metaphorical and literal hook to it, which links it to the next clause.

Colons: Not only do I use these for introducing lists ("We need three things from the store: bread, baloney, and a gun"), but I also use it to show how one thing leads to another, like an arrow -- which is really what the list-introduction thing is doing too -- ("The thing you have to remember is this: even Vonnegut can sometimes be full of crap.") To me, the mark itself even feels like I'm looking down on the pillars of a gateway.

Parentheses/Dashes: Both of these marks are used to add little extras and asides into the text, but are subtly different. To me, parentheses are like the edges of a hole that reveal something beneath the page, something hidden or not-so-obvious... "Greg refused to eat mashed potatoes, even in restaurants (as a child, his mother had often refused him dessert unless he had eaten them all)." Dashes, though, create a kind of pedestal to lift the words up above the rest of the text... "We ran out of the school doors -- let's go ride our bikes! -- and dashed down the street."

Ellipses: These are my favorite. Three periods in a row, that physically trail off into empty space the way sentences that end with them would if they were spoken. I use them to indicate that there's more to a story than is being told, or a conclusion is being implied that the reader has to divine for themselves: "I wasn't the only one who hated summer camp that year...". I also use it when someone is being thoughtful, and is stating a fact but maybe hasn't figured out all of what it means yet: "Maybe there's a reason people are fascinated by this...". It's the most interactive of the punctuation marks, drawing the reader in and asking them to participate in filling in what's been left unsaid.

I was reading a bilingual children's book with my daughter a few weeks ago, and we started talking about how, in Spanish, there are upside-down exclamation points and question marks at the beginning of sentences, as well as the normally oriented ones at the end. And the concept struck me as brilliant. When you have a sentence that requires being shouted or asked, shouldn't you find this out before you're done reading/saying it? This makes perfect sense. English appropriates words and phrases from other languages all the time... this is one idea we should start using right away.

My point is this: English is a fascinating patchwork of other languages, taking what works (or is particularly insightful) from elsewhere and folding it into itself, always in the process of reinvention. And I'm not just talking about the written language. Our spoken language is expanding in amazing -- and amazingly fast -- ways. At the same time, people are wringing their hands and saying (as they have every time a new form of communication comes along) that we're losing it to the Tweetering and the LOLing and emoji-ing. I say that if we want to keep our written language vibrant and alive, it's got to be able to express what we feel in a way that can also represent the way people think. That's what it's there for, after all. And that process is different now in the 21st century. So let's give English some breathing room. Forget the random rules that Vonnegut, Strunk and White have tried to foist on us, "thou shalt not split infinitives" and all that. Let's allow sentences to flow and breathe and get the hell punctuated out of them. And if an informal, texty sort of English evolves alongside a lengthier, more expressive written version, then so be it. The Japanese have been doing it since their language's inception.

Being bilingual is never a bad thing.

Thermodynamics II: Electric Boogaloo

Let me kick this essay off by saying that I have no inherent problem with Creationism as a belief. It takes many forms, from radical Young Earth believers to micro-evolutionists, and my intent here isn't to try to convince anyone or prove/disprove anything. I don't believe these theories myself, but I live with and love someone who does. So while there's disagreement, I'll defend to the death the right to say what you like, if I might paraphrase.

The one thing I can't abide, though, is misinformation. And I keep hearing the same bit of it from the more outspoken Creationist side of things. Just as there can be evolutionists who are jerks about calling Creationists stupid and wrong, the invective can flow the other way too. And when it does, the old chestnut that states that evolution defies the second law of thermodynamics usually gets pulled out. This might sound like a compelling argument to someone who isn't familiar with this scientific principle before, but it's easy to misunderstand, and this misunderstanding is what's being perpetuated.

So I'm hoping to set the record straight on this one issue, at least. I just can't watch the work of Isaac Newton and some of the other brilliant minds that have contributed to this discovery being misused this way. So here's my counter-argument...

The second law of thermodynamics states that, left to its own devices, order always runs to chaos. It's the basis for the idea of entropy. An example of this is that hot food left on the table will always move toward room temperature. Energy never spontaneously moves in the other direction. Now, some people will take this idea and extrapolate it, saying that this thermodynamic law contradicts the theory of evolution. They will ask: how can something as ordered as life start, not to mention evolve from simpler to more complex forms, all the way up to and including humans, if everything tends toward chaos? Doesn't that have to mean that some kind of divine hand is intervening, adding a counterbalancing force of some kind, in effect making an exception for us?

Well, no. They've got it right that entropy does exist everywhere and without divine intervention, no exceptions are made. But the folks who argue against evolution in this manner forget thermodynamics’ one caveat... that entropy only constantly increases within a closed system. Increasing order is possible, if there's a source of energy being applied. Life, after all, is only the redistribution of energy, changing raw material into structure, then using that structure to turn stored energy into a combination of motion and heat.

But Earth is *not* a closed system. We have a constant energy source, infusing our planet with something like 33 billion watt-hours per square mile every day. The one thing missing from their thought-experiment is the Sun. Absolutely, entropy works. But on the other hand, your food won't cool to room temperature if you keep hitting it with heat lamps. If order always ran to chaos regardless of how much energy you put into it, then we would see exceptions counter to known physics (other divine sparks) in every baby that is born, and every time a seed, dirt and sunlight turns into a blade of grass. However, that just isn't the case.

So that's one point. But it still doesn't fully explain how constantly adding energy makes it possible for life to arise naturally. Other arguments you might hear are that this happening is less likely than throwing the constituent parts of the human eye up in the air and having them land together perfectly, or watching a tornado pass through a junkyard, only to leave an assembled car in its wake.

Again, a compelling-sounding argument, but these are two wildly inaccurate analogies. Neither the human eye nor a car spontaneously came together whole, but incrementally, and every step in their creation led toward the next, more complex, step. Evolutionists believe it's the same with the start of organic life. We're not proposing that a spark of lightning in a murky pool created a little swimming creature. Not at all. What we're suggesting is that, sometime in the billions of years of history of Earth, at least one happenstance combination of organic compounds didn't get broken apart by its violent surroundings quite as quickly as its counterparts.

Those organic compounds had only a slightest of advantages of "survival" over those around them. But that was all they needed. Eventually there were more of these clumps, again found by quintillions of random molecular interactions over the course of hundreds of millions of years. And later on, a variation of this arrangement came along that worked even better. Thus began a constant process of trial and error, favoring the random designs that worked and winnowing out those that didn't. Not only did the sun provide the energy to keep these compounds interacting and floating in liquid water, but its cosmic rays also caused many small random changes that assisted the process (aka mutation). This is where the random-eye/tornado-car analogies break down. It's not a case of nature throwing random stuff together until a perfect form appears. It was a constant refinement of possibilities, building each new step on top of an earlier one. There are at least six kinds of eyes that have independently developed in the animal kingdom, which also shows that there's no one "perfect" way to do anything when it comes to biology.

Maybe part of the anti-thermodynamic crew's problem comes from the use of the word "law", and I agree with them on this one. It always makes me cringe when someone in authority calls anything scientific a "law" -- be it evolution, thermodynamics, or even gravity -- because science should never assume it has spoken the final word on anything. Case in point: One of Isaac Newton's other famous postulations is about the clockwork-like workings of gravity. His formulas worked perfectly well 99.9% of the time, until we realized that it doesn't quite account for objects that have unusually strong gravity, or are moving unusually fast. Einstein stepped in three hundred years later and course-corrected our ideas with special relativity, which solved the remaining .1%. Today we consider the theory of gravity to be complete, but it would only take one verified defiance to tell us that we have further refinements to make. This mutability is one of science's biggest strengths, and has kept us from discarding new discoveries simply because they didn't feel intuitively right. Keep what works, erase what doesn't... A sort of evolution of thought, you might say.

So those are my thoughts on these "scientific" arguments against evolution. True, there are logical ways to attack evolution, just as there are logical ways to promote Creationism, and there are even ways to combine the two. But thermodynamics just isn't one of them.

Although I have one final problem with those who promote this "contradiction", and it's really the most insidious one... who is this particular argument for, exactly? I can't imagine that a person who understands thermodynamics is going to disavow their beliefs after hearing it. This can only mean that people who parrot this argument are, knowingly, using incorrect information to reinforce something *that* *they* *themselves* *believe* to others, who probably already believe it anyway. This is an even worse crime, I think. You shouldn't need to deceive to get your point across if it's a valid one.