I don’t really know. I try to understand. But… Higgs!
The Higgs Boson Explained from PHD Comics on Vimeo.
[Daily log: walking, 4 km]
Category: Science & SciFi
Caveat: Adieu, Minitel
France’s Minitel is dead. I remember when it seemed very high tech and forward-thinking. I remember when I thought, “Why doesn’t the U.S. do something like that?”
We got AOL instead. And then, eventually, the internet evolved. But somewhere along the line, Minitel became quaint and old.
Caveat: Prosocial
I'm not sure what, exactly, to make of this abstract of a recent social sciences study (the article itself is paywalled, and I have little interest in actually trying to read it). But to control-c-control-v the abstract here:
Recent research has revealed that specific tastes can influence moral processing, with sweet tastes inducing prosocial behavior and disgusting tastes harshening moral judgments. Do similar effects apply to different food types (comfort foods, organic foods, etc.)? Although organic foods are often marketed with moral terms (e.g., Honest Tea, Purity Life, and Smart Balance), no research to date has investigated the extent to which exposure to organic foods influences moral judgments or behavior. After viewing a few organic foods, comfort foods, or control foods, participants who were exposed to organic foods volunteered significantly less time to help a needy stranger, and they judged moral transgressions significantly harsher than those who viewed nonorganic foods. These results suggest that exposure to organic foods may lead people to affirm their moral identities, which attenuates their desire to be altruistic.
On the one hand, I want to say that there was always something about the organic-foods-only people that got on my nerves, and now I have proof. On the other hand, I want to ask, if crappy food promotes "prosocial" behavior, why is everyone so antisocial when everyone eats so badly in, e.g., the USA? It depends on how one defines a term like "prosocial," I suppose. Lastly, I wonder, what is this broader purpose of this research? What is their broader social hypothesis? Where are the researchers going with this?
[Daily log: walking, 3 km]
Caveat: Cause For Optimism
"the trash-strewn lots of Detroit and the subway tunnels of New York support far more biodiversity than the sterile, “sustainably planted” forests that cover most of the continental U.S." – Christopher Mims, in an article at a site called Motherboard.
This seems depressing and darkly pessimistic, but frankly, I find in it cause for optimism. Why? Because that means nature is actually pretty good at building biodiversity "under duress." The world is not ending – merely changing. And evolution is all about adaptation. Things will go on.
Caveat: Superlinearity
It's probably not interesting to most people, but I find it fascinating: a scientist has decided that cities are different from anything else in the biological sphere (i.e. cities are, after all, collective organisms), because they experience "superlinear growth." Which is to say, cities grow faster as they grow bigger – whereas growth in every other biological system slows down as it gets bigger. What are the implications of this? Is this like comparing apples and oranges? Read a NYT article here, or another article by Stewart Brand here.
Caveat: gol-dagged new-fangled gadgets
This was quite entertaining.
[UPDATE: Linkrot took this video away for all of us. Sad because I didn’t even write down what the video was about or anything, so I cannot search for a replacement. Yay internet!]
That hightech stuff always freaks me out. Below – a rotary-dial iphone:
Caveat: ¿qué piense Ud?
This academic paper is potentially interesting, but I can't really say, since it's behind a paywall. Here's the abstract, in full:
Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue? It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic. We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases. Four experiments show that the framing effect disappears when choices are presented in a foreign tongue. Whereas people were risk averse for gains and risk seeking for losses when choices were presented in their native tongue, they were not influenced by this framing manipulation in a foreign language. Two additional experiments show that using a foreign language reduces loss aversion, increasing the acceptance of both hypothetical and real bets with positive expected value. We propose that these effects arise because a foreign language provides greater cognitive and emotional distance than a native tongue does.
I have some questions. How is "thinking in a foreign language" defined? If you're thinking in it, how is it foreign? What about native bilinguals?
Caveat: there is a social side to defensive vomiting
This article is so bizarre, not because I doubt its scientific authenticity, but just because of the material it covers. Really, it’s just caterpillars. I think the title to the article would make a good title for a pseudo-autobiographical novel: Caterpillars are more likely to vomit alone. I will begin an outline immediately.
Extended quote:
This new study shows that there is a social side to defensive vomiting. The researchers found that whether a caterpillar is willing to regurgitate — and to what extent — depends on the size of its social group.
Caveat: Schemanarrative
Schematic? Narrative?
Regardless, it gave me a sort of a chill, watching this video: a sort of schematic narration of the overwhelming complexity of our world, its interdependencies, the way we exist embedded in multifold schemas that we don’t understand and are barely aware of. And in a very short story-line, there’s also an actual character created, which seems to possess the rudiments of personality and internal life – perhaps a la Sims. For some reason, I was thinking of Joyce’s Ulysses as I watched this. That might seem strange, but I believe some might see that there’s a sort of logic to it. “A day in the life…” and all that.
What I’m listening to right now.
[UPDATE 2018-02-03: Video replaced due to having noticed link-rot (old video taken down?).]
Röyksopp, “Remind Me.”
Plus, I like Röyksopp.
Now, tangentially – or perhaps in the mode of a constructive, philosophical supplement (and please don’t be alarmed if you don’t see the connection to the above, as I’m writing here largely for my own future’s perusal, because my reading happened to coincide with my discovery of the “schemanarrative”) – I will offer an extended quote from Fredric Jameson’s Valences of the Dialectic, on the topic of his “utopian hermeneutic” (the chapter is entitled “Utopia as Replication”; the “genealogy” he’s referencing is Nietzsche’s):
There is so far no term as useful for the construction of the future as “genealogy” is for such a construction of the past; it is certainly not to be called “futurology,” while “utopology” will never mean much, I fear. The operation itself, however, consists in a prodigious effort to change the valances on phenomena which so far exist only in our present; and experimentally to declare positive things which are clearly negative in our own world, to affirm that dystopia is in reality Utopia if examined more closely, to isolate specific features in our empirical present so as to read them as components of a different system. This is in fact what we have seen Virno doing when he borrows an enumeration of what in Heidegger are clearly enough meant to be negative and highly critical features of modern society or modern actuality, staging each of these alleged symptoms of degradation as an occasion for celebration and as a promise of what he does not – but what we may – call an alternate Utopian future. [p. 434]
I would only add that perhaps we have to remember that dystopias and utopias, both, are reliant on narratives that are essentially the same, and which may or may not be historical, just like Nietzsche’s genealogies (or even marxian dialectics of various flavors). Not historical, and not ahistorical – maybe a good word would be “pseudohistorical” – but why not just call it “narrative”?
Caveat: Thoughts
A Japanese company is making cute cat ears controlled by your thoughts. Really.
And they say Japan is in permanent recession… if this is what a society in permanent recession comes up with, well, then… bring it on. I seem to vaguely recall reading about something like this in William Gibson's novel, Count Zero, way back in the late 1980's.
Meanwhile, this blogging at Scientific American reveals the gaps in current neuroscience, despite achievements like the nekomimi above: "Neuroscientists: We don't really know what we are talking about, either." Ehrm… for the gullible, please note the April 1st dateline on the posting.
Caveat: Better Living Through Electricity
The future is coming. I can't decide if this is creepy or interesting or inspiring – the idea that you can improve your affect and performance in a training task by running electricity through your brain in a certain way. The article is interesting.
Caveat: Earthscraper
I have no idea how advanced these plans are, to build a 65-floor “earthscraper” (an underground, “downward pointed” building) under Mexico, D.F.’s Zócalo (central historic plaza). And I understand people’s concerns about building such a thing in such an earthquake prone area (although it’s worth noting that during the huge 1985 quake, for example, the subway was actually a pretty safe place to be). So maybe the “earthscraper” is not a serious project. But it would be very cool.
Caveat: v12
Having worked as a truck mechanic, and having grown up in the household I did, I have a strong interest in (and fascination for) engines, although I never developed the level of passion for vehicle mechanicking that seems to have been my birthright (by which I mean my father, grandfather and great-grandfather were/are all passionate auto-mechanic hobbyists).
Some guy in Spain makes miniature engines that actually run. Here’s a video of him putting together and testing a V12 engine. I think it’s really interesting.
Slightly related to the above (in the aspect of “hand-made” industrial devices), I also ran across a story about a guy who tried to make a toaster “from scratch” – I mean really from scratch. I think it was meant as a sort of performance art. It’s intriguing.
Caveat: Super-Linear
Returning, once again, to the theme of densities and cities and sustainability, I saw the following TED video (if you’re not familiar with TED, it’s worth going and looking around). I’ll let the guy do the talking.
[UPDATE: the link to the TED talk rotted… and I don’t even know what the title was. It’s unrecoverable knowledge. Yay, internet!]
Caveat: Spagga & La Raza – Nueva York (with a digression on manhattany density)
What I’m listening to right now.
Spagga & La Raza, “Nueva York.”
Well, I managed to run across a novel problem, for this new Background Noise “feature” of mine: I couldn’t find a youtube for the particular music track I was listening to. So, being the resourceful type, I made one. I can’t find the lyrics for this song online, either. I might try to transcribe it at some point, I think it’s pretty interesting for Nuyorican Rap.
The pictures I added to the video are lame – I was in a hurry, and I just slapped in a few pics I found via the goog. The last picture is something I found that’s not even in NYC, it’s in Chile, but it seemed like a good picture to put on at the end.
To change the subject a little bit, but still on the topic of Nueva York, I was thinking some more about my entry the other day about “all the world’s people in one city” – questions of density. Here’s the fascinating thing. Paris was the densest city mentioned in that graphic I posted at that last entry.
But I thought to myself, surely there are places more dense than Paris. And of course, listening to Spagga & friend, this evening, I thought: Of course! Manhattan!
I ran the numbers. If all the people in the world lived in a city of Manhattan’s density they would fit in an area almost exactly the same size as… get this… South Korea. Interesting, huh? Can you imagine this entire mountainous little republic covered in high rises? It’s pretty easy to do – they’ve made a heckuva start on it already.
Caveat: Still Thinking About Densities
I’m contemplating the density question, vis-a-vis issues of per capita environmental impact. I ran across an interesting graphic the other day.
Here’s what I starting thinking about, in seeing this. The “Paris” version, above, is the densest – so imagine the world’s population living in that space. That would be one messed up ecosystem, there on the Mississippi delta. The impact would be, essentially, total. But think of this: the rest of the world would be empty of people. Maybe there would be some agriculture – this sort of graphic doesn’t say how putting everyone in one city would see how their resource needs were taken care of, how they would be fed, etc. But let’s imagine a best-case scenario, with all the people living in this giant megalopolis in the Mississippi delta, and then a bunch of sustainable automated farms and mines feeding it. Hmm… kind of science-fictiony. And I don’t want to try too hard here. My only thought … my main point… is that this mega-city’s impact would be huge, but the rest of the planet would have much, much lower impact. That seems to lead to the ability to imagine the Earth much more sustainably carrying its current population. QED Density is a good idea.
Just more random thinking.
Caveat: Climate Scientists, Yo!
Something about this video's sincerity and "heart" struck a chord in me. Note – you might not enjoy this video if you have never enjoyed the Beastie Boys.
Whether it's a valuable contribution to the "debate" is a different question. I'm not sure.
[hat tip: sullyblog]
Caveat: Consumption and Environmental Impact
Last week I posted a blog entry in which I mentioned my belief that a high-density urban lifestyle is more “sustainable” and has lower environmental impact. This was in the context of a cartoon which I posted there, which included the words: “Do you use roads? Do you live in civilization? You are responsible for cruelty to animals.”
An old-new acquaintance of mine, Jeannine (really, my absolute oldest friend – she was my best friend sometime around second grade), commented on facebook as follows: “I think that whether high-density urban living vs. country living is “more impact” depends on how one lives one’s life in either environment. And well, then, there is ‘do you use roads?’ So it’s probably a draw.”
Now, the thing is, I respect her opinion highly, on this matter, because I happen to know that she is a professional ecologist of some kind. I’m not one of them types o’ people. The best I can say is that I completed a minor in botany in college (which I failed to declare because I already had two other minors and the paperwork was annoying, but trust me, I did the course work, and it was fun). Oh… and I was once a card-carrying member of the Green Party.
But I have thought long and hard about this stuff, and all during the past week, I tried thinking through just how strongly I believe this. Here’s a modified (somewhat caveat’ed) version of my statement:
All things being equal, a high-density urban lifestyle has lower environmental impact than a rural one.
The key phrase is “all things being equal” – I mean by this, that “to the extent we can make the same lifestyle choices in different environments.” Lifestyle, obviously – in the broadest interpretation – is where the greatest environmental impact comes into play. And lifestyle includes a great deal more than the binary choice of urban vs. rural.
Here’s my thought experiment, at its most simple.
It’s related to the Econ 101 idea conveyed by the phrase “economies of scale.” If you live in a giant apartment building, with your workplace near by and/or easily accessible by good public transportation, your day-to-day existence will have less impact on the environment, overall, than if you tried to live a basically equivalent lifestyle in a single-dwelling house in the suburbs or out in the country. That’s because, for example, in an apartment building, you use less energy to heat your apartment, since you share resources with your neighbor. And you drive less to get the same results in terms of commuting for work and leisure.
But it’s key to remember that I’m assuming equivalent lifestyle – to the greatest extent possible.
Obviously, one can make choices about how one lives, in either context, that increase or decrease one’s environmental impact. Some of those choices are easier in the country, and some are easier in the city. My personal choice of recent years – not to own a car – is much easier in the city, now, than it was living in the country, last year. Someone else’s choice, say, to consume only locally grown, organic produce would maybe be much, much easier in the country.
The thing about country life that perhaps makes it seem like it has lower environmental impact is that you’re not surrounded by millions of others also having an impact on their environment. The other thing about the rural life that must be noted is that, unlike the urban lifestyle, it can be “unplugged” completely – which obviously is a very, very low impact lifestyle. But just because such a choice is possible in a rural environment doesn’t mean many people actually bother to make such a choice, and the fact of the matter is that in developed countries, country people and city people mostly make very similar lifestyle choices, which means their overall impact is quite comparable.
Ultimately, in my thinking at least, it comes down to the issue of per capita environmental impact. And that’s crucial. I think the inhabitants of Seoul City have devastating overall environmental impact in comparison with, say, the residents of Molokai (which I choose since Jeannine lives there, and which happens to be almost exactly the same size, in square kilometers, as the area enclosed by the Seoul City limits).
But, if you look at per capita impact, I bet Seoul, with its 10 million, has Molokai, with its 7,000, beat. Hands down. I mean, I can’t guarantee that, obviously – I don’t know enough about all the components of what environmental impact really even means. But how likely is it that a individual Seoul resident, on average, has more impact on his or her environment than an individual Molokai resident?
One thing I do when I think about this, is that I try to find some intellectually comfortable, more simple proxy for the concept of overall environmental impact. I think one good proxy is the much touted (recently touted, anyway) concept of carbon footprint. Again, Seoul’s carbon footprint is greater than Molokai’s – but on a per capita basis, and accounting for inflows and outflows (meaning imports and exports of goods made by / consumed by inhabitants), I would bet that Seoul’s is lower than Molokai’s.
This is really just a thought experiment. Another thing that I think about, a lot, is that for most of us, figuring out our overall environmental impact is stunningly difficult. There’s carbon, of course, but there’s also all the other chemicals we put out, directly or by virtue of what we buy. There are disrupted ecologies, due to infrastructure ranging from farms to factories to highways to human-oriented “parks.”
I remember reading somewhere that, perhaps coincidentally and perhaps by causation, our rate of overall consumption, in dollar terms (or in terms of whatever currency we’re using), is an almost perfect proxy for our carbon footprint. Which is to say, if someone consumes at a rate of $40000 per year, their carbon footprint for everything they do (travel, food, etc.) will be double a person’s who consumes at $20000 per year and half of a person’s who consumes at $80000. It’s just a more or less perfect statistical correlation, obviously grounded in the way our human ecology (which we call economy) happens to match up with our natural ecology (which includes our carbon footprint). Of course this is hardly an accident – just as it’s not an accident that both “ecology” and “economy” start with “eco-.”
I therefore imagine that there might, in fact, be a strong correlation between our rate of economic consumption and our overall environmental impact, too. This makes it much easier for amateurs in ecology to think about, and evaluate, their environmental impact. It boils down to a simple question, with easy ways to make changes and adjustments in behaviors.
We can ask ourselves: how much am I consuming, in dollar terms? And, in most societies for most people, this isn’t that different a number than what we’re earning – very few of us are socking our income away at high rates and spending low proportions of it.
The end of this metaphor or analogy is that we can simply look at our tax return and decide what our environmental impact is. I mean… very roughly speaking.
Some time back, once I decided this analogy or way of thinking made sense to me, I made a very conscious decision, starting in about 2006, that I was going to lower my environmental impact by simply attempting to reduce my rate of consumption. I set for myself a somewhat conscious goal of lowering my income. That sounds horribly un-American. But it’s not hard to do – you have to admit that. I changed careers from something lucrative (computer programming) to something unlucrative (teaching – and overseas, at that!). I gave up driving – except for road trips. I happily live in a smaller apartment than an average American would consider acceptable. I limit meat consumption (as I’ve described here many times before, I basically only eat meat when in the company of others, in the context of them deciding what to order). I buy mostly locally grown produce (easy to do in Korea since they grow everything here in hothouses and discourage food imports through massive tarriffs – those Chilean grapes in the store ain’t cheap like in the US). Etc.
I don’t mean to come off sounding “high and mighty” or superior. I am certainly not blind to the irony of the fact that my previous post was about consumption, and about my “stuff” and how happy I was to have some “stuff.” My only point is that trying to understand and control our overall environmental impact is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, without degrees in economics or ecology. But if we just think in terms of consumption, then we have a ton of options in front of us, and anyone can make lifestyle changes that lower consumption, and thus, almost inevitably, also lower environmental impact and/or increase sustainability. And to return to the urban vs. rural dilemma, I can say that urban lifestyles are more easily adaptable to patterns of lowered consumption in the context of maintaining certain minimum “privileges,” vis-a-vis the Western, modern lifestyle, and thus they’re more sustainable.
Caveat: Sun Found to Be Cause of Global Warming
Who would have thought? But seriously, I'm certainly not what one would call a global warming skeptic, but I have been known to harbor doubts about the anthropogenic aspect of it. This report on recent scientific work on the variable radiation output of the sun sheds some additional light on the subject.
Global warming or not, I've been really cold lately. Obviously a bit under the weather in one way or another, sleeping far more than usual at night, and not fully "with it" during the day.
The latest iteration on the date for my upcoming move to the new housing facility: next Monday. I'm not looking forward to it. I will not have internet at home, again, for at least a while. And of course, as mentioned before, I can't access my blog's maintenance page from school computers. Just like the Toys R Us website, it's arbitrarily blocked.
Caveat: The Meanwhile Knob
Overheard on NPR, this morning (well, yesterday afternoon, in NPRland): Lynda Barry (cartoonist, author and one-time romantic interest of Matt Groening) is talking about someone else's innovation on the time-machine concept, with the introduction of a "meanwhile knob." Not much detail is provided as to how the "meanwhile knob" works, but I'm deeply intrigued. I've long thought that a good time-machine should include more than just a simple "front-back" control. I've long enjoyed the Heinleinian conception of a multidimensional "alternate-universes" control, where you can go back or forward not just to "your" past or future, but, by missing the correct calibration, end up in infinitely variant alternatives as well.
But the idea of a "meanwhile knob" is even more interesting. I think for Barry, based on the context of her comments, it's intended to capture the fact that "inside time" – how we perceive time and carry it around with us – things are in fact rather non-linear. You can have multiple narratives going: the immediate outside-your-body surroundings, the recent memorable event being reviewed, the historical novel in front of you, the upcoming meeting which you're planning out in your head. So a time machine with a meanwhile knob suddenly becomes as much a device for altering consciousness as one that somehow alters physical reality. Which, of course, given the physics of time travel, may, in fact, be the more plausible way to take on time travel.
Meanwhile, I'm going to get another cup of coffee. I have an intense day coming up, at work. More bigwigs will be visiting our English classroom – there's going to be an "opening ceremony" along with a demonstration class that I and my coteachers will have to do. Someone (read: the nuclear power plant people) has put a huge amount of money into this poorly-designed, high-tech language classroom, and now they want to see how it worked out – it's up to us to make it look good.
Caveat: Starstuff
“I stepped out from a supernova. And so did you.”
[UPDATE: The link rotted, and is unrecoverable – I simply can’t even find what it used to point to, anywhere. Very sad.]
Caveat: Twice as Wet as the Sahara Desert
NASA has found a lot of water on the moon. I think moon colonies are much more probable, because of that. I doubt NASA will be involved in building them, however. Maybe the Chinese? Maybe the Russians? Maybe a private undertaking?
Caveat: (bio-)diversity
New York City is justifiably famous for being one the most diverse places in the world, in human/cultural terms. But it turns out that the city is equally notable for its biodiversity, according to an article in New York magazine (that I found out about in Tom Scocca's blog). Partly, it seems that it's not just humans that land in New York City as immigrants and find the city a hosptitable place – the population of "invasive species" is huge. But it all seems to sort of work. Kind of just like the human experiment called NYC.
Interesting.
I read about things like this. I reflect on the complex coexistence of nature and urbanism that I see in a country like South Korea (which I read is the second most densely populated country in the world, after Bangladesh – if you take city-states such as Singapore and Monaco out of the running). I begin to wonder if those "population alarmists," who feel that the world is doomed due to human overpopulation, are completely wrong. Human population is, without a doubt, radically altering ecosystems – including, of course, global climate change. But… that doesn't mean that these radically altered ecosystems will necessarily "collapse" or be unsustainable.
I guess, when you get right down to it, I'm not a apocalypticist, but rather a transhumanist, in futurist matters.
Caveat: Are We On Zanzibar?
John Brunner's novel Stand On Zanzibar is a new wave science fiction novel written in the 60's and meant to be taking place in 2010. The novel made a very profound impression on me, when I read it while still in high school – in fact, all of my college entrance essays referenced the book, if I recall.
Since it was set in 2010, it might be interesting to re-read it now. I think it had a darker vision of the future than what has actually come about – I recall a sort of constant-state-of-war, a la Orwell's 1984, but with a McLuhanesque flavor.
I wonder if I could get a copy here in Korea.
Caveat: Becoming the Ghosts of Our Ancestors
I was really sore yesterday, from the hike on Saturday. So I didn't do much. I watched some television; I started to try to write a story that was so terrible I immediately wanted to delete it.
Then last night I had some very strange dreams. The dream I was having when I woke up this morning was like some strange science-fiction movie, with many details and complex plot-twists. It was one of those "remote colony on another planet gradually goes insane" plots, but there were features to the plot that made it uniquely mine.
The colony was a Korean colony: yes, there were Koreans making space colonies. And I was there, as some kind of token non-Korean. I often didn't know what was going on. So far, so much exactly like real life.
But… there were invisible monsters stalking the colony – a la "Forbidden Planet." Members of the colony kept disappearing. Soon many of the buildings and areas were dilapidated and vacant.
Then there was some weird time-travel experience. The few remaining survivors of the invisible monsters, including myself, locked ourselves into an underground room and decided to go into some kind of cold-sleep for 100 years, to await a rescue team.
After 100 years, when we came back out, much to our surprise, there were people living in the colony, including families with children. The people were living the lives of traditional, pre-modern Koreans, although they still had some technology. They thought we were the ghosts of ancestors. They had set up Jang-seung (traditional Korean wooden totem poles, carved with the faces of spirits) around the encampment.
And then the awaited rescue team arrived, finally. The rescue team included my sister. She was very unimpressed by the state of things. "Why have you been wasting time building farms and having children?" she demanded, pointing at all the mysterious people who had taken over the colony. I didn't know. I was as puzzled as she was. I was worried about the invisible monsters, still.
There was one strange building, that had been built, while we were in cold-sleep: it looked a little bit like a church, but was full of machinery. I went to look at it, on a hill, with my sister and some Korean soldiers from the rescue team, who were chain-smoking cigarettes. The building was surrounded by carefully planted redwood trees. When we got to the building at the top of the hill and looked back down at the colony, all of the people had disappeared. The colony was deserted. I wondered if we ALL were ghosts.
That's about when I woke up. Pretty complicated dream. A little bit like Juan Rulfo's "Pedro Paramo," in space.
Caveat: Genesis Defunct
I was reading in the 13.7 blog on NPR's website that the Big Bang theory, as a theory of beginning (and not in its role of describing the universe's conditions billions of years ago), is becoming more and more precarious, scientifically.
I've always wondered a bit about this, but my take on it is more related to the problem time itself presents: it's just a dimension, which happens to have a sort of built-in directionality or "slope" (forward), that our perceptions roll down. And to talk of beginnings or endings in the broad sense of the whole universe neglects the very real possibility that time is a local condition, rather than a universal one. Which is to say, there's no meaning to concepts of begenning or ending without any time. Beyond time.
I suppose you could say that I'm trying to apply the so-called anthropic principle to time, and suggest that time is just an accident of our (local) universe that seems special but isn't. It seems special because it's part of what gives our consciousness its unique, weird, consciousness-like characteristics. But in the bigger picture, it's a minor, even irrelevant characteristic, or a sort of emergent property of other, deeper things, in the same way that there is a specific value for pi that emerges from the mathematical relations between points in a plane, or that we experience something we call temperature, which is really just the fact of a large bunch of particles wiggling at a certain average energy level.
Caveat: spinning faster by 1.26 microseconds per day
I read an article in the LA times recently that said that the recent giant earthquake in Chile shortened earth’s day by 1.26 microseconds. Somehow, the adjustment to the distribution of mass for the planet as whole was such that the earth began to spin a tiny bit faster, kind of like a spinning ice-skater pulling in his or her legs to spin faster.
1.26 microseconds isn’t much. In something short of a million years, we’ll lose one day, because of it. Plan your calendars accordingly. And it’ll make a good excuse, if you’re late for work.
Caveat: “the ashtrays aren’t even full yet!”
My friend Gerry (of Teulon, Manitoba), whom I visited today, is an astronomer and "space geek." The very moment I pulled into his driveway, he accosted me and pointed upward and said, "there goes the International Space Station, just in time to see it!"
Sure enough, the glowing object was passing directly overhead, zooming along. To my uninformed eyes, if I'd seen it without that introduction, I'd have thought it was just some airplane.
Anyway, a little bit later we were talking about the ISS because it showed up in the news on the television that we were sitting and watching, in his living room. And he was complaining about NASA's shortsightedness in wanting to end the program and shut it down. He was talking about the Russians having showed interest in taking it over and continuing to maintain it, if the US gave it up, and he explained the Russian perspective memorably, saying, "… but the ashtrays aren't even full, yet!" That sounded so stereotypically Russian, and it made me laugh very hard, conjuring up the image of a bunch of Russian cosmonauts sneaking cigaratte breaks on the space station when those uppity Americans finally weren't around.
Hmmm, aside from the fire and health hazard, are there other possible issues with smoking in space?
["back-post": posted 2009-11-20]
Caveat: How much does the internet weigh?
Sun Microsystems, working with Internet Archive (the people who host the "wayback machine" which is basically a historically aware copy of the entire internet all the way back to 1996), has packed the whole thing into a single shipping container full of servers. According to the article at the Reg, that means that there's a copy of the entire internet in that box. That's pretty cool. And that means you could put the entire internet (well, a copy of it) on the back of a truck. Or store it somewhere safe. Or launch it into space for some future alien civilization to try to make sense of.
Caveat: Floor Mats
During my years in Burbank, working for Paradise, I learned more about the commercial floor-mat market than I ever dreamed possible. Certainly, it was more than I wanted to know. Why am I mentioning it now? I saw the guy changing out the floor mats here at LBridge hagwon — replacing the dirty ones with clean ones. These are "logo mats" — they have the hagwon's name on them (maybe sometime I'll sneak a picture and post it). And I felt this weird kinship with the man rolling out the mats and lugging the dirty ones to the elevator.
"I've done that," I thought. Well, I wasn't the delivery guy. I was a "corporate office" guy, doing database things. I analyzed customer buying patterns across different product lines, and helped tell the marketers who they should target for their next promotion, or worked out more cost-effective ways to enforce large corporate contracts with respect to our unruly branch service locations. But all of us central office types had gone on the occasional "route ride," where you accompany the delivery guys as they go out and deliver the uniforms, mats and other laundered paraphernalia to the customers. I'm not sure if LBridge rents these mats, or if they own them and pay a laundry service to clean them. I have no idea if the company cleaning them operates giant computerized plants all over Korea or is a mom and pop business that spreads them out on concrete somewhere and hoses them down.
But I spent way too much time thinking about it. Speculating about the secret lives of our hagwon's floor mats. Or maybe it's not bad to spend time thinking about it. Mostly, most people never think about things like the vast number of rubberized floor mats that exist in businesses all over the world: how they get there, who owns them, what they're made of, how much they cost, who cleans them. I remember when I worked at the Casa in Mexico City, watching the maids taking them into the courtyard and having to hose them off and scrub them. Unpleasant business. And I had to do that with floor mats myself, when I worked at that 7-11 store in Boston, that summer. Where were the rental and laundry guys, then?
And… there are wider cultural questions. What's the cumulative carbon footprint of all rubberized floor mats, in all the world? I mean, there's manufacturing issues, the wasted water and toxic chemicals involved in cleaning them, and disposal issues, too. Are they really necessary? Are there alternatives? What are those alternatives? Would western civilization be the same, without them? Would we all be languishing in hospitals with fractures acquired from slipping on slippery floors? Would retail business models collapse due to a lack of repeat business, because there were no snazzy floor mats establishing brand identity in the entryways?
Oh… that gets deep.
Caveat: Incidental Meat
I've been thinking about meat. I read an article in Scientific American about the "carbon footprint" of eating beef, specifically. It's quite stunning, and it has got me to thinking, once again, about whether or not I would ever seriously become some kind of vegetarian (maybe a chicken-and-fish-only type, or a real vegetarian, or even a vegan). All those things have crossed my mind many times. But I lack the self-discipline to stick to any of them, it seems like.
Only hours after reading the Scientific American article, I was ordering and eating bibimbap from Gimgane. The amount of meat in it is negligible, I suppose – at most some flecks of meat that might equal something under a tablespoon. I'm not even sure what species of meat it is. But… I'm not the sort to be a hardcore "I don't eat such and such," it seems like.
Still, it seems the compelling reasons for avoiding various types of meat keep building. There's health impact (unless you're an Atkinsian). There's ethical impact (I have been reading a book by Douglas Hofstadter, I am a Strange Loop, wherein he offers in his first chapter a meditation on meat-eating vis-a-vis the question of the relative sizes of souls). And now, particularly for beef, there's global environmental impact, too. The basic point: if we ALL quit eating beef tomorrow, and let the beef industry die, we'd do more to prevent the continuing global warming trend than if we ALL stopped using cars tomorrow. That's very plausible, if you examine the facts.
So, I'm wondering how I feel about it. I've been developing a sort of approach that is kind of based on the distinction between "incidental meat" versus "intentional meat." Intentional meat is when I go out and seek it. When it's the "purpose" of a dining experience. Incidental meat is where I'm eating meat because someone else has ordered it. Or they're giving it to me. Or it got added, unexpectedly, to something I ordered (like the bibimbap the other day). Maybe something can be made of this distinction.
Caveat: Trapped on Planet Earth
The recent satellite collision in the news got me to thinking about a thing called Kessler Syndrome. The idea that it’s entirely conceivable and possible that we litter our Earth-proximate space with so much high-speed junk that it becomes difficult or impossible to launch vehicles into space anymore, as the debris becomes a kind of space-borne mine field that will pelt and puncture anything passing through. Humanity’s forays into space might be ended by humanity’s own shortsightedness vis-a-vis the appropriate utilization of it.
Caveat: Sparrow
I picked up a novel while visiting my mother's house (always a good place to pick up novels). The book was The Sparrow, which I finished a week or so ago. It was a very intense novel, both fascinating and ultimately disappointing, for me. I won't go into the details or make an effort at a review–better discussions and reviews can be found many places on the web, including the Amazon spot linked above. I will only say that basically I concur with the Publisher's Weekly reviewer who states "The final revelation of the tragic human mistake that ends in Sandoz's degradation isn't the event for which readers have been set up."
I enjoyed the anthropology/linguist themes, and they are developed quite well (as to be expected given the author's background). I had less fun with the religious/sociological aspect, as for the most part it seemed a rather pat re-hash of the 1492 encounter, and excessively and unnecessarily sympathetic to the Eurocentric viewpoint. Those aliens are real savages! How can we possibly interact with them, ultimately, except to end up murdering them or exploiting them? It's us vs 'the Other.'
It was a rather dark novel, but I won't blame it for the darkness of my overall mood lately. More just a curious synchrony than any kind of cause-effect.