Schrodinger's Blog

The annoying thing about a personal blog... okay, let me start over.

One of the many irritations about a personal blog is that you don't really know who you're writing for (besides yourself, I mean). I can't start writing like everyone on the internet's going to read this crap. Nor can I assume that no one will read it. It is weirdly, simultaneously private and public, riding a strange uncollapsible waveform of awesome philosophy (philawesomey?)

Here are a couple of things, to help you whittle away the time in whichever eigenstate you will eventually observe.

The Page 69 Test: So it may be true that you can't judge a book by it's cover, but I have recently been of the opinion that neither can you judge one by its contents. Marshall McLuhan suggested that you should choose your reading by turning to page 69 of a book and, if you like it, read the entire book. The Page 69 Test blog is evaluating McLuhan's suggestion book by book.

Here's one for the cat people (turn your speakers up).

Dorkiest pickup line (feel free to use): "CERN's gonna turn on the Large Hadron Collider soon, and this whole planet's going poof. This could be our last night together."

That's it. That's all I got. Actually, there is so much more, but it is all either very private, or else very public, and thus not suitable for print.

I Think I Can

One of the other things we talked about at dinner the other night, was Boxer and K's film, which I had seen at that conference thingy. I can't really do it justice, but my most constructive criticism consisted of "Needs more car chases. Also explosions".

Anyway, that film, wonderful as it was, is not the subject of today's post. Today's post is about the most amazing seventeen minutes in recent (non-documentary) cinematography. I'm referring, as if you didn't know, to the transcendent Madame Tutli-Putli, an existential allegory in stunning stop-motion animation.

I know, you never thought you'd hear "stunning" and "stop-motion" in the same sentence again. Not after the art reached it's zenith with those melting Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Well I'm going to go out on a limb here: in terms of stop motion bad-assery, Tutli has set the bar even higher. That's right, Madame Tutli-Putli is the new "melting Nazis".

You have heard of this film, but you know next to nothing about it. Perhaps you know that it was nominated for an Oscar. Besides the NFB's aggressive pursuit of total suppression of all of their work from the public consciousness (seriously, try to find their movies in any theater), the reason you don't know anything about this film is because it's pretty much next to impossible to describe.

Taking, once again, the example of Raiders, you could say something like "Yeah, it's an adventure film about a magical box, and it's got a bunch of melting Nazis and there's some pyramids. Pretty awesome".

My point being that there's a story there, a narrative that you can summarize. If I tried to summarize Tutli, it would come out sounding like: "One woman's metaphysical voyage into self-discovery as she battles Demons, shadows, and Jungian Archetypes. A journey we all must make in one form or another, but are rarely privileged to observe. Also, there is a train involved."

Utterly incomprehensible, mostly because my voice would come out muffled, by virtue of my head being buried up my ass. And so it joins the ranks of those films and books and games and dinner parties that cannot be described, but must be experienced, subjects that cannot be taught, only learned.

Those are my favorite types of things, because then you can ask someone "Do you have kids?", or "Were you in 'Nam?", or "Hey did you see those melty Nazis?", and if they say yes, then you instantly have that shared experience. It doesn't matter, in this context, that that experience may have been utterly the most abominable thing they've ever been through ("Hey, you're a recovering alcoholic too?"), what makes the concept of this unconveyable gestalt interesting to me is that anyone who hasn't been there cannot possibly understand no matter how you explain it (viz: most of this blog).

And since, as you may have guessed, I'm a lazy fucker who doesn't like to explain things anyway, that's just fine with me.

Put The Gun Down

No, I haven't forgotten you. I've just been really busy. Frantic really. Okay no, not really. Just lazy. Too lazy to form complete sentences, even. But I saw this thing today. A quote. From Umberto Eco, who's my favorite author of all time ever, and if he's not yours, well then talk to the hand. What's that? Nabokov? Okay, I forgive you. Anyway:

"A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection - not an invitation for hypnosis." - Umberto Eco.

I am totally gay for Umberto Eco. Even if he is an icky, seventy-five-year-old degenerate Italian. His "Foucault's Pendulum" has been described, to my intense rage and rising bile, as a "thinking man's DaVinci Code". To mention Dan Brown's execrable bolus of literary offal in the same sentence as Eco's transcendental prose is a disservice to the master semiotician's oeuvre. Whoever said this should have their tongue ripped from their head by wild dogs.

Mathemetaphor

There are a number of interesting (to me) opportunities for parallel between the pure abstract world of Mathematics, and the messy, sensual worlds of philosophy, art and thought. Like all parallels, they tend to converge toward infinity. Of course we can't just jump right into this feast of parallax without building up to it with a little digestif. So, by way of a cheese platter (and there may be some olives in there as well):

A Sierpinski Gasket is a type of ternary Cantor set, or self-similar set. It is constructed by taking a triangle, removing a triangle-shaped piece out of the middle, then doing the same for the remaining pieces, and so on and so forth, like so:



The result – if an infinite series can be said to have a result – is a pattern of infinite boundary, and zero area. This totally counter-intuitive concept is poetry in itself. To imagine that by recursive Swiss-cheesing, we can arrive at the Infinite, not by adding to the whole, in the gluttonous, possessive fashion of current North American consumerism, but by taking away, after the fashion of Francis of Assisi, Buddha, the Jain Dharmists:

"Trees renounce fruit and keep us alive. The mountains cast away stones and pebbles, which we use for our works and art. One should renounce worldly possessions devotedly within one's power (shaktistyaga)."

Hey. I'm not saying I'm ready to give up my iPod. This is all merely by way of illustrating that the path to enlightenment is multifold. There are many trail heads (We'll talk about Pi next time), and some of these lie outside the province of our personal expertise.

If you're catching what I'm pitching, throw it back in the comments.

What Do You Know?

Behind the curve as usual, I took a whack at the belief-o-matic, you know, because it takes a website to tell me my place in the cosmos, to tell me what I believe. I was raised Roman Catholic (sort of), got first-communioned and confirmed, went to Sunday school, learned my stations of the cross and all that. So I kind of expected that to be reflected in the results.

What actually happened is that Roman Catholicism came in dead last, even after Jehovah's Witness. So I don't know, is this yet another manifestation of my problems with authority? Am I rebelling against my childhood religious educational experience? Am I denying my cultural history? Chowing down on the flavorless pabulum of white, male, middle-class non identity? Are Catholics just plain nuts?

Results:

1.	Unitarian Universalism (100%)
2.	Liberal Quakers (96%)
3.	Theravada Buddhism (93%)
4.	Neo-Pagan (90%)
5.	Secular Humanism (90%)
6.	Mahayana Buddhism (86%)
7.	Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (79%)
8.	New Age (76%)
9.	Taoism (75%)
10.	Orthodox Quaker (70%)
11.	Jainism (66%)
12.	Reform Judaism (65%)
13.	Nontheist (61%)
14.	Bahá'í Faith (57%)
15.	Sikhism (48%)
16.	Hinduism (46%)
17.	New Thought (45%)
18.	Scientology (43%)
19.	Orthodox Judaism (38%)
20.	Seventh Day Adventist (36%)
21.	Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (35%)
22.	Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (31%)
23.	Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (30%)
24.	Islam (29%)
25.	Jehovah's Witness (18%)
26.	Eastern Orthodox (17%)
27.	Roman Catholic (17%)

Unitarian Universalism? What the hell is that? Turns out, it's a fancy way of saying "None of the above".

Story of my life.

StumbleUpon

Bertrand Russel once said that the point of philosophy is to start from something so simple as to not be worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it. In Plato's Meno, the title character asks Socrates "How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?" In other words, how can you know that you've arrived at the truth, when you don't know what the truth is?

Socrates runs circles around Meno, suggesting that by this logic, man cannot search for that which he knows, because he already knows it, nor for what he doesn't know, because he wouldn't know what he was looking for. Of course, this is the dumbest thing EVER, and so Meno, duly chastened, shuts his uninformed trap.

Personally, I'm of the opinion that the most rewarding way to arrive at an unknown truth is to trip over it in the dark, while on the way to the fridge for a midnight snack. Usually there is a sufficiently loud noise, as of a small plastic McDonald's toy being crushed by a grown man's bare foot, possibly a chair falling over. Some quiet but earnest swearing may also erupt.

More often, though, I resort to the "There is no absolute truth, and therefore to explore the nature of the Known or Unknown is ultimately without reward, so let's just watch Survivor."

This morning as I was leaving the house, Son gave me a big hug and said "I very love you, Daddy".

So cute.

Behold This, Biatch

Keats says "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know". Keats, in many ways, was a genius. In many other ways his stuff is utter, utter shite. The same can be said of most of us. Literary deconstructionists and philosopher pedants like myself will try to put one over on you by suggesting that The Truth Can Sometimes Be Harsh And Disturbing, So How Is That Beautiful, eh Smart Guy?

By way of riposte, allow me to arm you, not with any real ammunition, but something that makes a loud noise and bright light, enough to distract these assailants while you escape via carefully pre-planted neologism. Just as there is no Objective Beauty, there is no Absolute Truth. While it's quite the leap to suggest that this mere coincidence implies equality, at least in this, they are equal abstracts, convenient placeholders for whatever the hell it is we were just talking about.

Ooh Look! Something shiny!

I spent a thoroughly delightful evening in the company of the League of Overachievers last night, "swilling wine with willing swine", as it were, and came away with that warm, fuzzy, light-hearted feeling that has been all too rare lately. Boxer, IronMan and Directrix were all there, along with Boxer's Big Kid (probationary League intern). Of course I dazzled with my usual charm, wit, charisma and bonhomie (or at least drank enough wine to convince myself of my own charm, wit and charisma. The bonhomie, I still maintain, was genuine).

Of such an intensity was the awesomeness, that at times I cried tears of joy, and where my tears fell, tiny white flowers blossomed. Until around 2:00 AM, when I cried tears of intense peptic discomfort as all the wine I had downed wreaked it's tanniny revenge.

So, for lack of a feast, my brain has baked us a couple of Welsh rarebits:

1. Clichés should be avoided like the plague.
2. Speed Dating vs. Carbon Dating: Discuss.
3. The trick with Midget Porn is to watch it on a really big TV. Then it's just like regular porn.
4. Did you know that the word "gullible" is not in the dictionary? ("Oh no", you will say, astute reader, "I'm not falling for that one. Everyone knows there's no such thing as a dictionary!")
5. Yes, I sometimes have stubble. Does it make you want to kiss me any less? No? Then what's the problem?
6. I wonder if they have Methadone clinics, but for boobs? I'm totally addicted to boobs.

Next time: Stay tuned, victim! Is that...doggerel?

Probably not, actually.

It's Not a Race

So we stand once again on the edge of the stream of consciousness, and prepare to skip a rock across the placid waters of the mind. Prepare for unimaginable boredom.

One of Zeno's paradoxes of motion is illustrated in the parable of Achilles and the Tortoise. Basically Achilles - indestructible killing machine of the Myrmidon army, hero of various engagements in the Trojan war, and all-around stud - is set to race against a tortoise - wizened armored slowpoke and butt of philosophers' jokes.

Being a good sport, Achilles gives the tortoise a head start of, say, a hundred meters. If Achilles runs at ten meters per second (a prodigious pace of 22 miles per hour), and the tortoise runs at one meter per second, Zeno, venal and doddering old rascal that he is, says that Achilles can never catch the tortoise.

The theory is that by the time Achilles has run a hundred meters to catch up to the tortoise, the tortoise will have run an additional ten meters. In the time it takes Achilles to cover that additional distance, the tortoise will have progressed another meter, and so on, ad infinitum. This is the same logic that irrefutably proves that the minute hand on your watch can never overtake the hour hand. And as slow as time may seem to crawl on certain painful days, it is immediately apparent to the most casual observer that there must be some flaw, some hidden fallacy, in Zeno's perfect logic.

Ever get the feeling that no matter how hard you work, how much you apply yourself to a task, you'll never reach the end? All the tortoises are writing the rules and, slow as they are, they can't be beaten. Now I'm not such a good sport, and rarely give head starts if I can avoid it, but I've run a lot of those races recently, and visions of turtle soup are starting to dance through my head.

The tortoises will tell you "Work Smarter, Not Harder". This is a facile platitude for they that have no intelligence to lend. The only way to win this kind of race is to be the tortoise, and have other people try to catch up to you. But who wants to be a fucking tortoise?

Our philosopher's stone, flat, round and smooth, whipped with all the speed and skill that our feeble modern minds can muster, skips off the water here, causing easily ignorable ripples, sails low through the air, and splashes down again on the Fletcher's Paradox.

Another of Zeno's illegitimate sons of politics and philosophy, the Fletcher's Paradox asks us to imagine an arrow, released at speed. Maybe shot by that consummate archer, Achilles. Maybe he's trying to kill that fucking tortoise.

We are then asked to imagine an indivisible unit of time. Observing the position of the arrow at any of these moments, we see that the arrow is not moving. But, the theory goes, movement must occur in the present. It can't be that the thing only moves in the past, and in the future, but right now is motionless. Straining the credulity of the sane, we are asked to deduce that throughout all time, the arrow is motionless.

That makes no sense. Let me try again: If we posit an infinitely small period of time, then the amount of movement permitted in that period of time will be correspondingly small. Infinitely small movement is about as good as no movement at all (at least in 450 BC, when the value of PI was 3). But since all time is composed of the sum of these tiny moments, there must be no movement throughout all time.

Of course, this ties in nicely with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principal (doesn't everything?), which basically describes how precisely the position and momentum of a particle (or arrow) can be simultaneously measured -- if we increase the precision in measuring one quantity, we are forced to lose precision in measuring the other. So if Zeno has us imagine an infinitely small, indivisible unit of time, wherein we may observe the arrow's location with pinpoint accuracy, then yeah, our measurement of it's momentum will be correspondingly inaccurate.

Okay, so it's not moving. So what?

I've been doing whatever it is I do for going on 15 years now. And I do it well (according to my own unbiased and objective evaluation). A couple months ago I got "promoted" to Team Leader. I know, it sounds cool, like I'm captain of the Super Friends or something, but really, in a team of two people, it's a little underwhelming.

Time crawls. I go nowhere.

I need a vacation.