Chipotle I love you.

I ate chicken yesterday.

Shocking, I know.

Turns out Chipotle advertises on their website that they only use ethically raise chicken in their foods. Since my problem with eating meat centers on the ethical issues involved in factory farming practices, I didn't have a problem chowing down on one of my favorite burritos.

My brother in law made a very wise suggestion this past weekend, saying that instead of telling everyone I'm a vegetarian simply say that I'm boycotting factory farmed meat. People seem to find that less crazy...

Naturally, some of the lawyers with whom I eat lunch every day have tried to find flaws in my argument. They raise some good points:

• How can you trust the website of Chipotle?

There is definitely a trust issue to be dealt with. They're going to spin things so they look good. They cited an outside third party (Humane Animal Producer Society or something along those lines) that certified their producers as ethical. But how can you trust them? It seems plausible that this "objective" third party could easily be a sham organization set up to rubber stamp farms...

My response to this is that

1. Since this is a boycott with the goal of effecting the meat industry by changing my purchasing habits, supporting chipotle is sending a signal (albeit a minuscule one) that they're doing something good. I suppose the attempt by a company to appear ethical is better than companies that don't even try.
2. I haven't been perfectly consistent already, so taking this 'leap of faith' and trusting a company that may be tricking me is no worse that what I'm already doing. I haven't gotten to the point where veganism seems possible (give up cheese and eggs? this is hard enough already).

I look forward to going to Whole Foods, who I've heard carries lots of free-range meats. I'm also feeling pretty good about the sustainability of my little experiment. Free-range meat will be more expensive, and I won't have it every day so meat will remain a small part of my diet.

Also, I'm pumped because a coworker took me up on a bet that he couldn't go completely vegetarian for the next two weeks. Someone to share my pain with!

Multitouch is dead.

Scratching is the new interface. Check out what some clever folks over at Carnegie Mellon are doing with it:



Low tech, cheap, versatile, flexible... this has a lot of possibility. A laptop or cellphone placed on a desk or coffee table can transform it into a gigantic tablet or remote control. The walls of your house can control your music... all without installing any complicated or expensive systems.

Some hacker needs to take this and transform their coffee table into a remote control for Boxee or the XBox Media Center. I wonder if their code is open source?

To be XOR not to be

Can we introduce the concept of XOR into normal English please? For those who weren't electrical/computer engineers or studied logic in philosophy... XOR simply means "A or B, but not both." I propose we pronounce it with a z.

1. Dropping the word xor in regular speech would be awesome.
2. This would actually be useful.
   

For example, I'm currently working on a patent where we have to be very careful what we say, and keeping track of all of the ands and ors in the document is downright annoying. If we had a separate word for xor, my job would be a lot easier.

What's the next step to get this process started... urban dictionary? Should we include nand in there as well? Are there others I'm forgetting?

Like it xor not, I'm going to start using xor all the time now.

Life After Meat

Image via Wikipedia

So far this little experiment is going pretty well... Although I may have cheated, depending on how you classify shrimp. Seems the chef in the cafeteria seems to think it's vegetarian, so when I found it in my pasta... I decided not to make a fuss. I REGRET NOTHING!

Some stray thoughts:

Is it possible to be a good person? Does being a ethical require you to never do wrong? As an example, if being "good" requires a person to become a vegan, and they can only manage to become a vegetarian (still responsible for some pretty awful treatment of animals in today's world)... should they even bother being a vegetarian at all?

A slightly more extreme example would be a murderer (say the character Dexter from that awesome TV show) found a way to curb his impulses and only murder someone once a month rather than twice a month. He's saving lives! Is he a hero or a monster? A half-monster?

This brings up a pretty interesting difference between the nature of utilitarian ethics vs. Judeo-Christian ethics. My gut reaction towards the murderer in the example above makes me want to say that murdering one person rather than two doesn't make him half as evil. Do I need to invoke the concept of sin or heaven and hell to put all murderers in their own classification of evil?

Bottom line - if the ethics one adopts are so demanding that pretty much everyone falls somewhere in the "kinda evil" category.... is something wrong with the ethical system or something wrong with all of us?

Day 2 of Turning Vegetarian

Image via Wikipedia

Day 2 wasn't too bad, actually. I Did have a lot of fun at lunch when I announced to a table full of lawyers that I had decided to become a vegetarian. This came as something of a shock to them because only a week ago I had been making bold carnivorous statements such as "If it has cell walls it's not a meal." Naturally, their instincts were to try to cut my arguments to ribbons... which I attempted admirably to withstand.

One argument which was particularly tricky was what I'll call the 'natural' argument. In it's most basic form:

1. Some animals eat meat
2. Homo Sapiens evolved to eat meat
3. Acting as nature intended cannot be wrong

Conclusion: Eating meat cannot be wrong.

Perhaps I'll rebut the argument more fully in another post. Suffice it to say, digging into this gets tricky because it gets to the heart of what ethics is and how an ethical framework fits into the real world... heavy stuff.

Image via Wikipedia

This will seem like a joke to those of you who know me, but I've convinced myself to give up eating meat. Starting today.

I've recently been reading the books of Peter Singer, a philosopher who is best known for his work on animal rights and charity for the poor. When I took one of his classes in college, I found his arguments impossible to disagree with, but his conclusions outrageous. That was when I first seriously considered the possibility that what I was doing when I ate meat was wrong. Unfortunately (0r fortunately... I'm still not sure) life got in the way. Dietary demands from competing in a college sport and a lack of time and gumption made dropping meat a seemingly impossible task, so I never tried.

Revisiting the same arguments of Singer's now, I can no longer justify my eating meat in the majority of cases. Being young, single, and working long hours in the city means that I eat out almost all of the time. In these cases it's a matter of picking one item off of the menu rather than another. Is my preference for the taste of beef rather than tofu so important that I need to torture and kill an animal (who I imagine would very much prefer not to be tortured and killed) to satisfy it?

Short Term Goal:

1. Eat vegetarian options at all restaurants/office cafeteria.
2. Eat vegetarian when it doesn't inconvenience others.
3. Not feel bad when a meal doesn't fall into one of the above two categories.
4. Learn more about what foods I can eat ethically.
   

That being said.... My dinner tonight tragically undelicious. I hate Tofu.

Meat... MISS U

I hope to do some posts to discuss some of the other ethical quandaries bouncing around in my head, and I'll let you know how this little experiment is going. Please feel free to give me some support (if you're so inclined) or ridicule (I may actually prefer this, probably a better motivator for me). And definitely make fun of me if I stop within the next week.

Birds 1, Quantum Physicists 0

Turns out migratory birds might be better at entangling quantum particles than us, and they've been doing it for a long time.

Apparently their eyes can see the earth's magnetic field because they have structures in their eyes that can create entangled electrons from incident photons. As these electrons split apart, they remain entangled but are effected differently by earths magnetic field. This difference effects the electrical signal going to their brain, and is then translated into something the bird can see.

Wild. How did something like that evolve? This is very illustrative of the idea that the way we (or animals) understand the world around us is really only an approximation of reality, and through evolution we have taken advantage of whatever sources of information we can that prove to be useful from a survival perspective.