"Lucky you! You enjoy your own company as much as you enjoy the company of others. You are a great conversationalist and thrive in the wonderful kinds of connections you know how to have with your family and friends. You also equally enjoy your own company, whether sitting in a favorite chair with your book and soft music playing or meandering in the woods by yourself. You like coming home to your family or your roommate; but if no one is home, you find quiet, solitary time to be just as pleasurable. What a great combination to enjoy being outgoing and to be just as comfortable being reserved. Lucky you!!"
-eharmony.com Personality Profile, concerning my extroversion.
I will not be signing up for their services.
overdue obituary
My favorite memory of Maria Toledano popped into my head last night.
It was in Ms. Havern's epidemiology class, which we took first semester senior year. Often, we would do experiments that required sterilization of metal innoculation loops, which would be used to add bacteria to Petri dishes and other nice environments for them, and to sterilize the loops we would hold them in an ethanol flame.
As inevitably happens in a high school "science" class filled with fuckall seniors, the ethanol got spilled one day while Maria and I were working in a group. She went to clean it up and I said to her, jokingly, "you should probably just burn it. That stuff's clean, it won't make any smoke."
I'd barely finished saying these words before she, with a huge grin, struck a match. I didn't have time to object before she dropped it on the puddle sitting on the table.
I was right, there was no smoke, and the whole spill went up into carbon dioxide and steam in just a few seconds, not even emitting enough light to be noticed by Ms. Havern.
From that day on, Maria made a point of spilling ethanol on the table and burning it in fun patterns whenever we were doing any experiments. It started with a simple happy face, which looked like it was crying flames because the eyes had to be linked to the mouth. She would write obsenities in ethanol and burn them. The flaming "fuck," in particular, cracked me up the most.
I was a bit annoyed at the time, because I wanted to do the work for the class and not pull my papers away just before she threw the match, but in retrospect, Epidemiology was the most bullshit class I've ever had. I got an A in it without doing any work or handing in anything. Maria detected this bullshit much better than I ever did.
It was in Ms. Havern's epidemiology class, which we took first semester senior year. Often, we would do experiments that required sterilization of metal innoculation loops, which would be used to add bacteria to Petri dishes and other nice environments for them, and to sterilize the loops we would hold them in an ethanol flame.
As inevitably happens in a high school "science" class filled with fuckall seniors, the ethanol got spilled one day while Maria and I were working in a group. She went to clean it up and I said to her, jokingly, "you should probably just burn it. That stuff's clean, it won't make any smoke."
I'd barely finished saying these words before she, with a huge grin, struck a match. I didn't have time to object before she dropped it on the puddle sitting on the table.
I was right, there was no smoke, and the whole spill went up into carbon dioxide and steam in just a few seconds, not even emitting enough light to be noticed by Ms. Havern.
From that day on, Maria made a point of spilling ethanol on the table and burning it in fun patterns whenever we were doing any experiments. It started with a simple happy face, which looked like it was crying flames because the eyes had to be linked to the mouth. She would write obsenities in ethanol and burn them. The flaming "fuck," in particular, cracked me up the most.
I was a bit annoyed at the time, because I wanted to do the work for the class and not pull my papers away just before she threw the match, but in retrospect, Epidemiology was the most bullshit class I've ever had. I got an A in it without doing any work or handing in anything. Maria detected this bullshit much better than I ever did.
It turns out that the answer to my question is much simpler than I thought. My hunch was that water in the atmosphere somehow bent light to conform to its crystalization pattern. This was off. As Blaylock put it, "The answer isn't out there, the answer is in your camera."
My camera, I have discovered, has a hexagonal aperture, which causes a hexagonal diffraction pattern, not a hexagonal light scattering pattern through gasses, which, I realize now, makes absolutely no sense in regular experience. The Hubble, on the other hand, is designed in such a way that creates a square diffraction pattern, though it has a circular lens.
The next question, which I'd realized without seeing the signifigance of, was phrased by Blaylock. "Stars have a diffraction pattern, but galaxies don't. Why do you think that is?"
The answer was immediately obvious to me, but may not be to the reader. A star is, for all intents and purposes, a fixed point of light. A galaxy, however, though just as bright, from the right distance, is much larger and much further away. The individual stars that we do see do create diffraction patterns of their own, but the effect is smeared and blurred by the sheer distances involved. To clarify, the angular distance between one star on one side of a galaxy and another star on the other side of the same galaxy is just enough, over billions of light years, to blur out any diffraction pattern. If the galaxy itself shows any diffraction pattern at all, it's insignifigant and hard to see.
A star creates a diffraction pattern when a galaxy doesn't for the same reason a laser going through a double-slit creates a diffraction pattern while a regular lightbulb shone on a double slit doesn't. The distance differences, the uncertainty of original position of light as it tries to interfere, gives you a clear image.
My camera, I have discovered, has a hexagonal aperture, which causes a hexagonal diffraction pattern, not a hexagonal light scattering pattern through gasses, which, I realize now, makes absolutely no sense in regular experience. The Hubble, on the other hand, is designed in such a way that creates a square diffraction pattern, though it has a circular lens.
The next question, which I'd realized without seeing the signifigance of, was phrased by Blaylock. "Stars have a diffraction pattern, but galaxies don't. Why do you think that is?"
The answer was immediately obvious to me, but may not be to the reader. A star is, for all intents and purposes, a fixed point of light. A galaxy, however, though just as bright, from the right distance, is much larger and much further away. The individual stars that we do see do create diffraction patterns of their own, but the effect is smeared and blurred by the sheer distances involved. To clarify, the angular distance between one star on one side of a galaxy and another star on the other side of the same galaxy is just enough, over billions of light years, to blur out any diffraction pattern. If the galaxy itself shows any diffraction pattern at all, it's insignifigant and hard to see.
A star creates a diffraction pattern when a galaxy doesn't for the same reason a laser going through a double-slit creates a diffraction pattern while a regular lightbulb shone on a double slit doesn't. The distance differences, the uncertainty of original position of light as it tries to interfere, gives you a clear image.
I'm pondering. To best convey the object of my pondering, I need to offer some evidence, up front.
These three pictures, the first two taken by myself and the third taken by the hubble space telescope, have a stark difference between them that I recently noticed. The first picture is of the sun, obviously. The exposure was about a thousanth of a second, as I recall, as quick as my camera could take it.
The second picture was taken outside at dusk and was an 8-second exposure while steadied by a cement pillar.
The third picture was taken over the course of a year by the Hubble Space Telescope, and most objects in it are galaxies. There are, however, 6 stars, easily recognizable by their cross-like scattering pattern.
It is in these scattering patterns where my confusion lies. In the pictures that I took, the light spread out in a 6-sided pattern, hexagonally. In the Hubble picture, the light spreads out in 4 directions, quadrilaterally.
What is bending the light in our atmosphere to make it behave like this?
These three pictures, the first two taken by myself and the third taken by the hubble space telescope, have a stark difference between them that I recently noticed. The first picture is of the sun, obviously. The exposure was about a thousanth of a second, as I recall, as quick as my camera could take it.
The second picture was taken outside at dusk and was an 8-second exposure while steadied by a cement pillar.
The third picture was taken over the course of a year by the Hubble Space Telescope, and most objects in it are galaxies. There are, however, 6 stars, easily recognizable by their cross-like scattering pattern.
It is in these scattering patterns where my confusion lies. In the pictures that I took, the light spread out in a 6-sided pattern, hexagonally. In the Hubble picture, the light spreads out in 4 directions, quadrilaterally.
What is bending the light in our atmosphere to make it behave like this?
The New York Times' Tom Freidman purports that we're in a cold war with Iran. As we meddle with the middle east, they meddle to stop us and to fuck with us, and any direct attack on them by us would spell disaster for Israel. This seems to fit my version of reality pretty well, so I have to wonder: is it evidence of a cold war or just coincidence that the CIA is now recruiting through an ad on the New York Times' homepage?
I have taken two pictures of the vastness of the universe. both of them, conceptually, at least, came out of my own mind. one is photoshopped.
http://jakethrockmorton.googlepages.com/galaxy-eynightseconddraft.jpg
and
http://jakethrockmorton.googlepages.com/P1020155.JPG
they each came into being simultaneously, and each try to convey the same idea. they deserve some explanation.
I took the picture that makes the foreground of the nightscape on thursday night. I was in the middle of a paper that I was writing for Guy Blaylock's conceptual quantum physics class and contemplating quite deeply the meaning of the EPR paradox and Bell's inequality as it relates to quantum entanglement and moreso as it relates to me. Am I just a packet of information entangled with a photon speeding through the universe, set to coincidentally hit a machine that can teleport my state through entangled quantum teleportation, or is there a God?
I left the library having written one sentence, the first sentence, the most important sentence from which all else in the paper flows, utterly exhausted from the effort that it took. I stopped in the dining hall and had a plate of chicken wings absentmindedly, as I wrote more on my laptop about what little I understand of quantum physics. I left, intent on finishing my paper.
And then, I saw the rock.
I've been living in Sylvan for 8 or 9 months now, depending on how you count it, and for about half of that time that rock, a boulder resting about ten feet above the path on the way to the dorms, wasn't covered by snow and was therefore accessible. Despite its near-constant accessibility for the last 2 months, I'd never noticed it like I did around 11:30 on Thursday night.
I whipped my camera out and positioned it on the rock, aiming it down toward Lederle, catching most of the northern part of campus in one shot. That shot is the foreground of the nightscape. I took many more pictures that night, but that one was the most usable.
I went up after about an hour and settled in to finish my paper, which I did within 2 hours. I'll probably get an A on it. I had a job interview the next morning for a summer job in physics education, an awesome job involving the creation of nanotechnology education videos, and I didn't want to be half-asleep for it.
I had the oddest dream that night, the implications of which I've been coping with ever since. It was about the number two, which I represented in my mind as 2 boxes. Through some sort of mitosis-like process, these two boxes were squared, then cubed, so that I had a 2x2x2 cube. Happy at that, I decided that there was no limit here, that I wasn't bound by experience in my ability to abstract what the next power would look like, so I then visualized 2^4.
It looked strange. The simplest description is that of two identical cubes, each at the end of a 4th dimensional line, which I knew enough to abstract as time. I was now, I identified, looking at 16 unit^3-seconds. This wasn't so hard to imagine; it simply put an object's temporal dimension into a visual abstraction, allowing for instantaneous viewing of several moments of its existence.
I kept going. 2^5 abstracted as something that I lack the original language to describe. Width, in time, has been long-covered by science fiction writers: it contains the different things that could be happening now if the past were different. so here I was, looking at 4 states of the same cube; an earlier version and later counterpart in one dimension, one parallel history of the 2^3 cube, and another earlier and later state, with a different set of circumstances that came before.
I was dreaming, so the theta waves massaged my brain into believing all this. In fact, I was comfortable. So comforable that I proceeded to 2^6. Not unfamiliar territory, because it looked enough like 2^5, and has a subtle difference. On this set of time axes, 2^6 is a cube, not a square, and a cube allows for diagonal travel. I was seeing, in the same image, 4 1-dimensional timelines of this cube, but not only those lines, but the lines between them. Here, almost, is where language breaks down in its ability to describe these abstractions. 3-dimensional time and 2-dimensional time are different, but it is hard to describe how.
A Mobius loop, in space, can be best represented by a strip of paper that is twisted an odd number of times with its ends taped together. Casual examination will reveal to the casual scientist that this object, for all intents and purposes, is one-dimensional, though it exists in 3-dimensional space. It has only one side, and only length, if the width of the sheet is ignored.
A Mobius loop in time elucidates the difference between 2-dimensional time of the 2^5 abstraction and the 3-dimensional time of the 2^6 abstraction. Just as a Mobius loop in space can't exist in 2 dimensions because it couldn't be twisted, the horrible-to-think-of temporal Mobius loop could only exist in 6-dimensional spacetime, where 2^6 could be best represented as a 64 unit^3 second^3 hypercube.
I kept abstracting upwards in this dream. However, past the above points, words cannot describe what I saw, and if better physicists than me have thought of such words, then I do not understand them enough to duplicate them. I arrived at a 2^8 megasquare and promptly dreamt about something else.
Come morning, these abstractions temporarily flew from my mind as I prepared myself for the job interview with Professor Tuominen. Nanotechnology research sure as hell beats the shit out of the Border Cafe for summer employment, so when I heard about this job I jumped at it.
Walking out of his office a couple of hours later, feeling somewhat ambiguous, I went to Professor Blaylock's lecture, which I, a thousand years ago, had done a paper for. The dream begun to nag at me, but didn't have time to take hold before Blaylock put on the screen the single most fascinating picture of the sky that I had ever seen.
He identified it as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field survey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_ultra_deep_field), a picture of a seemingly empty region of the sky that, in a picture taken over the course of a year, contains about 10,000 galaxies, and by my count, 6 visible stars. The scope of this snapshot of celestial history shocked and awed me into forgetting almost completely about the number 2. I did forget about it, until class ended, anyway.
During lecture, Professor Blaylock explained the concept of John Wheeler's delayed-choice experiment, an experiment involving sending light through a beam splitter and deciding before the light would hit another one whether the second beam splitter should be placed or not, making the apparatus an interferometer or not. Statistically, the results of this experiment point inequivocably to one conclusion. Not only does the presence of the second beam splitter alter the path of the photon beam in the future, it alters it in the past, as well. Until the lights hits the delayed-in-being-placed beam splitter, or not, the path of the light to the detectors is undefined; it can be said to have taken both paths. However, if the beam splitter is placed and the light makes it through to a detector, by nature of the experiment it could only have taken one path. The inevitible conclusion is nonlocality in time.
This took me a few moments to grasp, but I subconsciously tied it to the dream that I had had the night before. Instinctively, I asked Professor Blaylock when I could meet him in his office to discuss the thoughts running through my mind, which were slowly increasing in speed and intensity.
Mandy tagged along and we waited outside Blaylock's office, looking at pinned-up newspaper articles about the LHC at CERN. As always, we discussed what would be said to the Professor so that we wouldn't waste his time. I told Mandy about my dream; she kind of got it. She responded with a comment on Wheeler's experiment: if, by Special Relativity, things that go the speed of light, namely photons, do not experience the effects of time, why should it matter when their wave function is collapsed? They certainly don't care. In essence, she was saying, we can't see the wave collapse of a photon from our reference point. A photon's reference point, being independent of time, exists in a collapsed state, because its end is the same as its beginning.
Blaylock arrived, and I started talking. I don't recall precisely what I said, but I conveyed my philosophical confusion with quantum mechanics, relating Schrodinger's cat, Wigner's friend and Wheeler's delayed choice experiment, along with the reference point paradox that Mandy had brought up in the hall, all into one great, grand question, which was, "Does collapse have to happen in a single, well-defined moment in time?"
Professor Blaylock, the single smartest human being that I know and who knows my name as well, took a slight breath and said, simply, "Good!"
Apparantly I had hit on something. He insisted that he had no answer for me, but gave me several key terms to search on if I wanted to read further on the philosophical ramifications of what I was saying, but I knew that I had reached the best logical solution, and it bolstered me into unknown territory. So I brought up the dream.
He sat there in silence as I drew, to the best of my ability, the first 6 dimensions in terms of 2. As I did so, I became slightly wild-eyed and overcome with the ramifications of it, finally. When I explained to him that I could see beyond 6 but couldn't describe it, he said that I was very close to String Theory, which contains 10 or 11 dimensions, depending on whom you ask. He then conveyed to me the single strangest cautionary tale that I'd ever heard.
A woman that he knew had once taught a graduate student who claimed to be able to see, or imagine, or visually abstract, if you will, 9 or 10 dimensions. He understood the math and could see it, so he was well on his way to becoming a prominent string theorist. However, he cut himself short by jumping out of a window before he received his Ph.D..
Meanwhile, I was slowly going more and more mad, just sitting there, seeming calm, though excited with myself. I don't know if he sensed my difficulty coping with the burden of such an imagination, or if he thought that it was a morbidly funny story worth sharing, but it helped.
Mandy and I thanked him for his time and left, and went to eat. Needing a moment of quiet to draw what was in my mind, I handed Mandy my computer and told her to read this story off of the SomethingAwful forums called "A Bomb in the Building," which related slightly to the lines I was drawing along, aside from being hilarious. The link might not last, but: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2819309
While sitting there, I drew the second picture that I linked way at the beginning of this post. It made me feel better, slightly, but at this point I was so burnt out and tired from the sheer volume of thinking I'd been doing that day that I had a splitting headache. I wanted to get the thoughts out before they went away.
A night passed, I suppose, though it felt like longer. I was looking through the pictures that I had dumped off of my camera onto my computer and decided to create a picture of a more tangible infinity than the dimensional one, so I grafted a portion of the Hubble Deep Field Survey onto the sky of a picture that I had taken, the result of which, the reader, no doubt, has seen by now.
One thing about the picture frustrates me, though. Light in our atmosphere diffracts in a hexagonal pattern. The 3 stars in that portion of the Hubble picture have their light diffracted in a square pattern, because there is no free hydrogen in the way of the Hubble, a space telescope. The terrestrial lights and the stars don't match, and it frustrates me.
This last afterthought, about, of all things, diffraction patterns of light through atmosphere and vacuum, convinces me, in addition to everything else that I've been thinking about over the last 2 days, that I'm a physicist, and am right to choose it as my major.
Yes, that's where all this was going.
http://jakethrockmorton.googlepages.com/galaxy-eynightseconddraft.jpg
and
http://jakethrockmorton.googlepages.com/P1020155.JPG
they each came into being simultaneously, and each try to convey the same idea. they deserve some explanation.
I took the picture that makes the foreground of the nightscape on thursday night. I was in the middle of a paper that I was writing for Guy Blaylock's conceptual quantum physics class and contemplating quite deeply the meaning of the EPR paradox and Bell's inequality as it relates to quantum entanglement and moreso as it relates to me. Am I just a packet of information entangled with a photon speeding through the universe, set to coincidentally hit a machine that can teleport my state through entangled quantum teleportation, or is there a God?
I left the library having written one sentence, the first sentence, the most important sentence from which all else in the paper flows, utterly exhausted from the effort that it took. I stopped in the dining hall and had a plate of chicken wings absentmindedly, as I wrote more on my laptop about what little I understand of quantum physics. I left, intent on finishing my paper.
And then, I saw the rock.
I've been living in Sylvan for 8 or 9 months now, depending on how you count it, and for about half of that time that rock, a boulder resting about ten feet above the path on the way to the dorms, wasn't covered by snow and was therefore accessible. Despite its near-constant accessibility for the last 2 months, I'd never noticed it like I did around 11:30 on Thursday night.
I whipped my camera out and positioned it on the rock, aiming it down toward Lederle, catching most of the northern part of campus in one shot. That shot is the foreground of the nightscape. I took many more pictures that night, but that one was the most usable.
I went up after about an hour and settled in to finish my paper, which I did within 2 hours. I'll probably get an A on it. I had a job interview the next morning for a summer job in physics education, an awesome job involving the creation of nanotechnology education videos, and I didn't want to be half-asleep for it.
I had the oddest dream that night, the implications of which I've been coping with ever since. It was about the number two, which I represented in my mind as 2 boxes. Through some sort of mitosis-like process, these two boxes were squared, then cubed, so that I had a 2x2x2 cube. Happy at that, I decided that there was no limit here, that I wasn't bound by experience in my ability to abstract what the next power would look like, so I then visualized 2^4.
It looked strange. The simplest description is that of two identical cubes, each at the end of a 4th dimensional line, which I knew enough to abstract as time. I was now, I identified, looking at 16 unit^3-seconds. This wasn't so hard to imagine; it simply put an object's temporal dimension into a visual abstraction, allowing for instantaneous viewing of several moments of its existence.
I kept going. 2^5 abstracted as something that I lack the original language to describe. Width, in time, has been long-covered by science fiction writers: it contains the different things that could be happening now if the past were different. so here I was, looking at 4 states of the same cube; an earlier version and later counterpart in one dimension, one parallel history of the 2^3 cube, and another earlier and later state, with a different set of circumstances that came before.
I was dreaming, so the theta waves massaged my brain into believing all this. In fact, I was comfortable. So comforable that I proceeded to 2^6. Not unfamiliar territory, because it looked enough like 2^5, and has a subtle difference. On this set of time axes, 2^6 is a cube, not a square, and a cube allows for diagonal travel. I was seeing, in the same image, 4 1-dimensional timelines of this cube, but not only those lines, but the lines between them. Here, almost, is where language breaks down in its ability to describe these abstractions. 3-dimensional time and 2-dimensional time are different, but it is hard to describe how.
A Mobius loop, in space, can be best represented by a strip of paper that is twisted an odd number of times with its ends taped together. Casual examination will reveal to the casual scientist that this object, for all intents and purposes, is one-dimensional, though it exists in 3-dimensional space. It has only one side, and only length, if the width of the sheet is ignored.
A Mobius loop in time elucidates the difference between 2-dimensional time of the 2^5 abstraction and the 3-dimensional time of the 2^6 abstraction. Just as a Mobius loop in space can't exist in 2 dimensions because it couldn't be twisted, the horrible-to-think-of temporal Mobius loop could only exist in 6-dimensional spacetime, where 2^6 could be best represented as a 64 unit^3 second^3 hypercube.
I kept abstracting upwards in this dream. However, past the above points, words cannot describe what I saw, and if better physicists than me have thought of such words, then I do not understand them enough to duplicate them. I arrived at a 2^8 megasquare and promptly dreamt about something else.
Come morning, these abstractions temporarily flew from my mind as I prepared myself for the job interview with Professor Tuominen. Nanotechnology research sure as hell beats the shit out of the Border Cafe for summer employment, so when I heard about this job I jumped at it.
Walking out of his office a couple of hours later, feeling somewhat ambiguous, I went to Professor Blaylock's lecture, which I, a thousand years ago, had done a paper for. The dream begun to nag at me, but didn't have time to take hold before Blaylock put on the screen the single most fascinating picture of the sky that I had ever seen.
He identified it as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field survey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_ultra_deep_field), a picture of a seemingly empty region of the sky that, in a picture taken over the course of a year, contains about 10,000 galaxies, and by my count, 6 visible stars. The scope of this snapshot of celestial history shocked and awed me into forgetting almost completely about the number 2. I did forget about it, until class ended, anyway.
During lecture, Professor Blaylock explained the concept of John Wheeler's delayed-choice experiment, an experiment involving sending light through a beam splitter and deciding before the light would hit another one whether the second beam splitter should be placed or not, making the apparatus an interferometer or not. Statistically, the results of this experiment point inequivocably to one conclusion. Not only does the presence of the second beam splitter alter the path of the photon beam in the future, it alters it in the past, as well. Until the lights hits the delayed-in-being-placed beam splitter, or not, the path of the light to the detectors is undefined; it can be said to have taken both paths. However, if the beam splitter is placed and the light makes it through to a detector, by nature of the experiment it could only have taken one path. The inevitible conclusion is nonlocality in time.
This took me a few moments to grasp, but I subconsciously tied it to the dream that I had had the night before. Instinctively, I asked Professor Blaylock when I could meet him in his office to discuss the thoughts running through my mind, which were slowly increasing in speed and intensity.
Mandy tagged along and we waited outside Blaylock's office, looking at pinned-up newspaper articles about the LHC at CERN. As always, we discussed what would be said to the Professor so that we wouldn't waste his time. I told Mandy about my dream; she kind of got it. She responded with a comment on Wheeler's experiment: if, by Special Relativity, things that go the speed of light, namely photons, do not experience the effects of time, why should it matter when their wave function is collapsed? They certainly don't care. In essence, she was saying, we can't see the wave collapse of a photon from our reference point. A photon's reference point, being independent of time, exists in a collapsed state, because its end is the same as its beginning.
Blaylock arrived, and I started talking. I don't recall precisely what I said, but I conveyed my philosophical confusion with quantum mechanics, relating Schrodinger's cat, Wigner's friend and Wheeler's delayed choice experiment, along with the reference point paradox that Mandy had brought up in the hall, all into one great, grand question, which was, "Does collapse have to happen in a single, well-defined moment in time?"
Professor Blaylock, the single smartest human being that I know and who knows my name as well, took a slight breath and said, simply, "Good!"
Apparantly I had hit on something. He insisted that he had no answer for me, but gave me several key terms to search on if I wanted to read further on the philosophical ramifications of what I was saying, but I knew that I had reached the best logical solution, and it bolstered me into unknown territory. So I brought up the dream.
He sat there in silence as I drew, to the best of my ability, the first 6 dimensions in terms of 2. As I did so, I became slightly wild-eyed and overcome with the ramifications of it, finally. When I explained to him that I could see beyond 6 but couldn't describe it, he said that I was very close to String Theory, which contains 10 or 11 dimensions, depending on whom you ask. He then conveyed to me the single strangest cautionary tale that I'd ever heard.
A woman that he knew had once taught a graduate student who claimed to be able to see, or imagine, or visually abstract, if you will, 9 or 10 dimensions. He understood the math and could see it, so he was well on his way to becoming a prominent string theorist. However, he cut himself short by jumping out of a window before he received his Ph.D..
Meanwhile, I was slowly going more and more mad, just sitting there, seeming calm, though excited with myself. I don't know if he sensed my difficulty coping with the burden of such an imagination, or if he thought that it was a morbidly funny story worth sharing, but it helped.
Mandy and I thanked him for his time and left, and went to eat. Needing a moment of quiet to draw what was in my mind, I handed Mandy my computer and told her to read this story off of the SomethingAwful forums called "A Bomb in the Building," which related slightly to the lines I was drawing along, aside from being hilarious. The link might not last, but: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2819309
While sitting there, I drew the second picture that I linked way at the beginning of this post. It made me feel better, slightly, but at this point I was so burnt out and tired from the sheer volume of thinking I'd been doing that day that I had a splitting headache. I wanted to get the thoughts out before they went away.
A night passed, I suppose, though it felt like longer. I was looking through the pictures that I had dumped off of my camera onto my computer and decided to create a picture of a more tangible infinity than the dimensional one, so I grafted a portion of the Hubble Deep Field Survey onto the sky of a picture that I had taken, the result of which, the reader, no doubt, has seen by now.
One thing about the picture frustrates me, though. Light in our atmosphere diffracts in a hexagonal pattern. The 3 stars in that portion of the Hubble picture have their light diffracted in a square pattern, because there is no free hydrogen in the way of the Hubble, a space telescope. The terrestrial lights and the stars don't match, and it frustrates me.
This last afterthought, about, of all things, diffraction patterns of light through atmosphere and vacuum, convinces me, in addition to everything else that I've been thinking about over the last 2 days, that I'm a physicist, and am right to choose it as my major.
Yes, that's where all this was going.
I just had a long stretch of about two weeks wherein I was so stressed about classes that I had no creativity whatsoever. the creativity reached it apex in new york, where I mixed together dozens of audio tracks into one cohesive cacophony. I took the LibriVox reading of Moby Dick and mixed all the tracks together, then overdubbed every single Beethoven symphony. it gives off the effect of being in a crowded room with violins tuning, a lull before the concert that never really starts. it's 90 minutes long. I captured the moment before a concert and stretched it out into 90 minutes, from easily 50 hours of audio. it's perfect.
but then I came back to school from new york and calculus hit me like a brick. I only just now got the flow that allowed me to do anything creative at all back. I guess this is why I'm not asleep; it's 4am. it's 4am and I'm charging my camera battery in a library outlet so that I can take some night shots, because tonight, I realized, is perfect.
I sound like Ed Wood.
but then I came back to school from new york and calculus hit me like a brick. I only just now got the flow that allowed me to do anything creative at all back. I guess this is why I'm not asleep; it's 4am. it's 4am and I'm charging my camera battery in a library outlet so that I can take some night shots, because tonight, I realized, is perfect.
I sound like Ed Wood.
there has been a minor setback. my camera is out of juice. I hope I can charge its battery here before the dawn. in the meanwhile, I'll give my paper another pass, and maybe articulate why I'm signed up for French 126 for next semester.
I intend to take french to the point where I wouldn't be too completely handicapped upon arriving in Paris. three semesters of intensives should get the job done. I want to go there, marry a cute radical socialist girl to obtain citizenship and then blow up cars and throw bricks at police. we have no revolution going on here, and there won't be one during my span of caring. France is where I need to go for it.
Maybe I'll emerge a conqueror.
I intend to take french to the point where I wouldn't be too completely handicapped upon arriving in Paris. three semesters of intensives should get the job done. I want to go there, marry a cute radical socialist girl to obtain citizenship and then blow up cars and throw bricks at police. we have no revolution going on here, and there won't be one during my span of caring. France is where I need to go for it.
Maybe I'll emerge a conqueror.
I'm inside a dark cave stuck on a device that puts the entire world's information into a 15 inch screen and claims to be worth the price it takes from my creativity. all bets are off, though; it just started raining outside. my options are twofold now that I have finished what is required of me for tonight. hide or frolic. I brought my camera and always wanted to know how well it could capture at 3am in the rain.
whoever needs drugs to have fun on a night like this ought to get therapy. mushrooms would be awesome right now, but the things I want to do would be hindered by them.
off I go.
whoever needs drugs to have fun on a night like this ought to get therapy. mushrooms would be awesome right now, but the things I want to do would be hindered by them.
off I go.
just like a buxom brunette, umass looks better in red. case in point:
http://jakethrockmorton.googlepages.com/umassredsky2desaturatedhighlighted.jpg
took the picture while I was waiting for the bus, then photoshopped it on my laptop on the bus.
I would write about Maria's funeral, but I ran out of words. the world will be worse off without her. throughout, Modest Mouse's "Black Cadilacs" was stuck in my head.
her body didn't resemble her in the least because it wasn't smiling.
it wasn't her. she was gone.
http://jakethrockmorton.googlepages.com/umassredsky2desaturatedhighlighted.jpg
took the picture while I was waiting for the bus, then photoshopped it on my laptop on the bus.
I would write about Maria's funeral, but I ran out of words. the world will be worse off without her. throughout, Modest Mouse's "Black Cadilacs" was stuck in my head.
her body didn't resemble her in the least because it wasn't smiling.
it wasn't her. she was gone.
I was walking on campus late at night tonight and I got a feeling as I observed the general affect of everyone around me. Something felt wrong. I kept hearing harsh noises; cars were driving too fast. People looked and acted nervous, but seemed outward about trying to hide it. No one smiled; there was no eye contact. Everyone just walked to where they were going, walking just a little bit too quickly. The general agreement seemed to be to put out a vibe of slight, growing, helpless fear. Whatever it was, whatever it means, it got to me. Something is happening to us, and people are noticing, if only subconsciously.
They're beginning to feel the facade crumble, that which has made it acceptable to run a war at a deficit while cutting taxes, that which has allowed the perversion of the economy and truth as an ideal. They’re beginning to care about the truth that they have seen all along, and want to do something about how distorted the world has become.
Action is not encouraged. They will take it anyway.
The zeitgeist is changing. I can smell it.
They're beginning to feel the facade crumble, that which has made it acceptable to run a war at a deficit while cutting taxes, that which has allowed the perversion of the economy and truth as an ideal. They’re beginning to care about the truth that they have seen all along, and want to do something about how distorted the world has become.
Action is not encouraged. They will take it anyway.
The zeitgeist is changing. I can smell it.
In the lull preceding the start of the magnificent "Underworld," the 1927 silent crime drama set to a live band, I was telling Matt and Chloe about the crane that fell on a midtown Manhattan building that afternoon, killing four. They were rightfully horrified, but my story wasn't even done before this forty-something in the row ahead of us in our shitty seating section on the balcony interrupted and asked me to repeat myself. I obliged and, as soon as the word "midtown" escaped my lips, she nearly screamed out, "Midtown where?! Like, near the Village?!"
Appalled by this total lack of geographical knowledge but willing to forgive it because we were in Somerville, MA, I began to explain that Greenwich Village is four or five miles from midtown. She became more scared at this prospect and wondered loudly if this accident had happened anywhere near Lincoln Center. I assured her that it had happened on the east side, and that I was sure that anyone that she knew was just fine. She didn't appear to hear my assurance, but instead stared into space for a moment, absorbed in her own world.
Enough time passed that it became socially acceptable for one of the three of us to start a new conversation, confident that this woman would stay out of it. Chloe had begun telling Matt and I about an interesting fact that she had found in the program, something about Underworld being the main inspriation for the 1930's original "Scarface," which Al Pacino starred in the remake of decades later, when the woman turned around and interrupted her mid-sentence: "How does my hair look? I'm not too old to have it up, am I? You can tell me if I am. Should I have it up or down? Does it look alright if I sweep it behind my ears, or should I have it hang in front? Go ahead, you can tell me."
Not only did I not want to tell her that her hair looked equally ratty and gray no matter how she had it, I had no desire to sugarcoat that into something more tactful. Chloe saved the day, or so we thought, with: "Oh, it looks fine either way, but you should wear it up." I was still confused as to why this old lady was talking to us, but decided that she was harmless.
I finally took the opportunity, when custom permitted, to finish the story about the crane disaster. The bar on the ground floor of the leveled townhouse in eastern midtown was called Fubar. To a mild and morbid chuckle, I utter under my breath that Fubar is fubar.
The lady begins noticeably contemplating the ramifications of this revelation. After a few moments, just as we three teenagers practicing the ways of society were about to begin another line of conversation, and even slightly surpassing the subconscious cutoff where it is suddenly rude to speak up, she says, “Well, you know, Fubar, if you spell it backwards is rabuf, right? And rabuf, you know, the French, they call beef ‘beouf’ so ra-beouf, right? It must mean something.”
Realizing that she must be making a poorly constructed Francophobia joke, I and my thoroughly French companions chuckle mildly at the apparent attempt at humor. Without judgment, I tell her the meaning of Fubar as an acronym: Fucked Up Beyond All Repair. She doesn’t register this. Suddenly I realize where her line of thought is bringing her, a split second before the inevitable conclusion falls from her lips.
“Did you hear about the French documentary makers who were there when the twin towers got hit and had pictures of the whole thing? They must’ve been there for a reason… you know? I’d bet they were up to something….” She trailed off.
At this point, there was no stopping her.
“Because I know French; I’m fluent in French and when I was younger I lived in Michigan and we had this girl in our house that came from France and she was able to go to the university of Michigan because she lived with us… she was my house-sister for four years and I’d stay up with her all night just talking. These days we don’t hear a word from her, not even on Christmas. You’d think that since we let her have an American education she’d be a bit grateful and give me a call on Christmas but no, not since she was married.”
She paused for effect.
“And I know that she knows that I call her in France because she changed her phone and now when I call it says that it’s been disconnected. Ever since she stole her husband from me. Now she won’t call back.”
The three of us exchanged glances, filling in the gaps in this story with eye contact.
“So you see, if course, why I’m a little bit suspicious of the French,” she said airily, with a tone that belonged at a cocktail party. “What was she doing here, anyway? Probably earning American money and spending it in Paris.”
Chloe piped up again with a half-hearted “you shouldn’t not trust all French people because of one experience…” but she kept talking through this. I started hearing her again just as she said, “You know, my house-sister had a kind of a Jewish look to her. She looked Jewish. Brown hair, you know? She was probably spending money in France that she stole from America for the Four Pillars of Finance. You know about them, right? Four Pillars of Finance, yeah,” she concludes, as if we’d answered in the affirmative.
“You know what they did to the Towers. Probably hired those French documentary workers, too. Four Pillars of Finance. Yeah.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but we’re trying to have a conversation here,” Chloe says through partially gritted teeth.
“Oh yeah, sure,” she responds, and says nothing else for the rest of the night.
It is worth mentioning, as an afterthought, that as more and more people filed into the theater, every once in awhile she would get really happy to see one of them and stand up, waving frantically. No one came to meet her, and she sat alone.
Appalled by this total lack of geographical knowledge but willing to forgive it because we were in Somerville, MA, I began to explain that Greenwich Village is four or five miles from midtown. She became more scared at this prospect and wondered loudly if this accident had happened anywhere near Lincoln Center. I assured her that it had happened on the east side, and that I was sure that anyone that she knew was just fine. She didn't appear to hear my assurance, but instead stared into space for a moment, absorbed in her own world.
Enough time passed that it became socially acceptable for one of the three of us to start a new conversation, confident that this woman would stay out of it. Chloe had begun telling Matt and I about an interesting fact that she had found in the program, something about Underworld being the main inspriation for the 1930's original "Scarface," which Al Pacino starred in the remake of decades later, when the woman turned around and interrupted her mid-sentence: "How does my hair look? I'm not too old to have it up, am I? You can tell me if I am. Should I have it up or down? Does it look alright if I sweep it behind my ears, or should I have it hang in front? Go ahead, you can tell me."
Not only did I not want to tell her that her hair looked equally ratty and gray no matter how she had it, I had no desire to sugarcoat that into something more tactful. Chloe saved the day, or so we thought, with: "Oh, it looks fine either way, but you should wear it up." I was still confused as to why this old lady was talking to us, but decided that she was harmless.
I finally took the opportunity, when custom permitted, to finish the story about the crane disaster. The bar on the ground floor of the leveled townhouse in eastern midtown was called Fubar. To a mild and morbid chuckle, I utter under my breath that Fubar is fubar.
The lady begins noticeably contemplating the ramifications of this revelation. After a few moments, just as we three teenagers practicing the ways of society were about to begin another line of conversation, and even slightly surpassing the subconscious cutoff where it is suddenly rude to speak up, she says, “Well, you know, Fubar, if you spell it backwards is rabuf, right? And rabuf, you know, the French, they call beef ‘beouf’ so ra-beouf, right? It must mean something.”
Realizing that she must be making a poorly constructed Francophobia joke, I and my thoroughly French companions chuckle mildly at the apparent attempt at humor. Without judgment, I tell her the meaning of Fubar as an acronym: Fucked Up Beyond All Repair. She doesn’t register this. Suddenly I realize where her line of thought is bringing her, a split second before the inevitable conclusion falls from her lips.
“Did you hear about the French documentary makers who were there when the twin towers got hit and had pictures of the whole thing? They must’ve been there for a reason… you know? I’d bet they were up to something….” She trailed off.
At this point, there was no stopping her.
“Because I know French; I’m fluent in French and when I was younger I lived in Michigan and we had this girl in our house that came from France and she was able to go to the university of Michigan because she lived with us… she was my house-sister for four years and I’d stay up with her all night just talking. These days we don’t hear a word from her, not even on Christmas. You’d think that since we let her have an American education she’d be a bit grateful and give me a call on Christmas but no, not since she was married.”
She paused for effect.
“And I know that she knows that I call her in France because she changed her phone and now when I call it says that it’s been disconnected. Ever since she stole her husband from me. Now she won’t call back.”
The three of us exchanged glances, filling in the gaps in this story with eye contact.
“So you see, if course, why I’m a little bit suspicious of the French,” she said airily, with a tone that belonged at a cocktail party. “What was she doing here, anyway? Probably earning American money and spending it in Paris.”
Chloe piped up again with a half-hearted “you shouldn’t not trust all French people because of one experience…” but she kept talking through this. I started hearing her again just as she said, “You know, my house-sister had a kind of a Jewish look to her. She looked Jewish. Brown hair, you know? She was probably spending money in France that she stole from America for the Four Pillars of Finance. You know about them, right? Four Pillars of Finance, yeah,” she concludes, as if we’d answered in the affirmative.
“You know what they did to the Towers. Probably hired those French documentary workers, too. Four Pillars of Finance. Yeah.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but we’re trying to have a conversation here,” Chloe says through partially gritted teeth.
“Oh yeah, sure,” she responds, and says nothing else for the rest of the night.
It is worth mentioning, as an afterthought, that as more and more people filed into the theater, every once in awhile she would get really happy to see one of them and stand up, waving frantically. No one came to meet her, and she sat alone.
The inevitable conclusion of freudian duality is zealotry.
That is, if you believe that you are good and they are evil, that you are right and they are wrong, then the furthest and most honest extent that this can be carried is radicalism and violence. If we are good and they are evil and we know this, the only thing we can do is kill them and train our children to kill them. We must send our armies to their lands and destroy them until the day comes when they are us, and then they will no longer be a bother to us. Until that day comes, however, we must perpetuate the conflict that will lead to that inevitable day when we have conquered not just their lands but their hearts and minds, or destroyed them and replaced them with our own, like the Athenians at Milos.
A zealot, one marked by their fervent partisanship for a person, a cause, or an ideal, will stop at
nothing to promote this radical agenda. Though the word itself is derived from the Jewish rebelling against the Romans in the first century of the Common Era, a worthy fight against a tyrranical power, it could also just as easily apply to the Roman soldiers who put them down, and the politicians who sent them. Each side of the conflict knew that their position was the right one; the Romans just happened to back up their position with a big enough army.
No one benefits from this duality. If so many wars hadn't been fought in history, I'd say that the assertion of this duality itself is invalid and wrong, because most people are relatively moderate. Can the power of this zealous duality be such that it overpowers the moderation that most people practice? The evidence suggests this.
Can the moderates overthrow the zealots without becoming them?
That is, if you believe that you are good and they are evil, that you are right and they are wrong, then the furthest and most honest extent that this can be carried is radicalism and violence. If we are good and they are evil and we know this, the only thing we can do is kill them and train our children to kill them. We must send our armies to their lands and destroy them until the day comes when they are us, and then they will no longer be a bother to us. Until that day comes, however, we must perpetuate the conflict that will lead to that inevitable day when we have conquered not just their lands but their hearts and minds, or destroyed them and replaced them with our own, like the Athenians at Milos.
A zealot, one marked by their fervent partisanship for a person, a cause, or an ideal, will stop at
nothing to promote this radical agenda. Though the word itself is derived from the Jewish rebelling against the Romans in the first century of the Common Era, a worthy fight against a tyrranical power, it could also just as easily apply to the Roman soldiers who put them down, and the politicians who sent them. Each side of the conflict knew that their position was the right one; the Romans just happened to back up their position with a big enough army.
No one benefits from this duality. If so many wars hadn't been fought in history, I'd say that the assertion of this duality itself is invalid and wrong, because most people are relatively moderate. Can the power of this zealous duality be such that it overpowers the moderation that most people practice? The evidence suggests this.
Can the moderates overthrow the zealots without becoming them?
I'd like riots to happen in Iowa.
Scratch that.
I'd like riots to happen everywhere. I want there to be so many riots that the national guard can't put them all down.
There's going to be a tipping point. If nothing changes after this election, which I don't suppose it will, not on enough of a scale because the democrats and republicans aren't disparate enough, this point will come.
The economy is going to crumble in the next year. Oil is going to get more expensive; the baseline for gasoline is going to go from the current $3 a gallon to a minimum of $4 a gallon. People are going to be quiet about their discontent as they get more and more pissed off.
At some point soon, there is going to be a very hot summer during a recession and an oil crisis. People will not be able to afford to run their air conditioners, or even their fans at any high speed, as electricity gets more expensive. In such conditions, it's slightly cooler outside, so people will leave their houses in search of relief.
Crowds of people, mildly upset at their lowered standard of living, will gather outside trying to catch a breeze. They'll start to congregate and talk to eachother about their lives. In the thousands of places in which such spontaneous meetings happen, one in a hundred is likely to contain someone who feels that senseless violence will even out the game; that rioting against the government that got us into this mess is a worthwhile solution.
In the group of people that I find myself a part of, I will be this person.
In a smaller number of groups, this incitement would be well met, sparking a heat- and anger-fuelled riot. The police would then come, as would the media, along with any given person
on the street with a video-capturing device. The next day, the idea of rioting as a solution
would spread. In a perfect scenario, the country would fall apart in a few months.
I'd like riots to happen everywhere. I want there to be so many riots that the national guard can't put them all down.
There's going to be a tipping point. If nothing changes after this election, which I don't suppose it will, not on enough of a scale because the democrats and republicans aren't disparate enough, this point will come.
The economy is going to crumble in the next year. Oil is going to get more expensive; the baseline for gasoline is going to go from the current $3 a gallon to a minimum of $4 a gallon. People are going to be quiet about their discontent as they get more and more pissed off.
At some point soon, there is going to be a very hot summer during a recession and an oil crisis. People will not be able to afford to run their air conditioners, or even their fans at any high speed, as electricity gets more expensive. In such conditions, it's slightly cooler outside, so people will leave their houses in search of relief.
Crowds of people, mildly upset at their lowered standard of living, will gather outside trying to catch a breeze. They'll start to congregate and talk to eachother about their lives. In the thousands of places in which such spontaneous meetings happen, one in a hundred is likely to contain someone who feels that senseless violence will even out the game; that rioting against the government that got us into this mess is a worthwhile solution.
In the group of people that I find myself a part of, I will be this person.
In a smaller number of groups, this incitement would be well met, sparking a heat- and anger-fuelled riot. The police would then come, as would the media, along with any given person
on the street with a video-capturing device. The next day, the idea of rioting as a solution
would spread. In a perfect scenario, the country would fall apart in a few months.
A short treatise on apathy and art
The difference between apathy and giving a damn is art. Apathetic persons, apathists, if you will, do not see aesthetics like those who give a damn, and couldn't care less for the beauty of the world that moves those who give a damn.
If apathy is opposite from art, then apathists are opposite from artists, those who give a damn. This completely turns on its ear the definition of art. Art is, in following with this line of thought, anything that defies apathy. Artists, then, are those who do anything that defies apathy.
Apathists vastly outnumber artists. Their disinterest plagues the world, and will end it, unless we artists do something about them. Apathy needs to either be cured or destroyed.
A war on apathy would be as effective as a war on terror. A campaign for art, however, would achieve the same ends.
If apathy is opposite from art, then apathists are opposite from artists, those who give a damn. This completely turns on its ear the definition of art. Art is, in following with this line of thought, anything that defies apathy. Artists, then, are those who do anything that defies apathy.
Apathists vastly outnumber artists. Their disinterest plagues the world, and will end it, unless we artists do something about them. Apathy needs to either be cured or destroyed.
A war on apathy would be as effective as a war on terror. A campaign for art, however, would achieve the same ends.
every time that I feel a very strong and specific emotion, an elvis costello song that perfectly matches that feeling gets stuck in my head. even if it's just one part of it that I remember that's stuck, the entire meaning of the song conveys my emotion. it's an awesome barometer.
I wish I had some examples at the moment. as they come to me I'll write them down.
I wish I had some examples at the moment. as they come to me I'll write them down.
Once upon a time, in Long There, I went around the Corner Haven because there was some really hot, huge girl. Her thighs had silky skin, cry and weep! Valentine’s day is a scream. So why do I never have to give a hand-job with wonderful tiny hands? I don’t hope what do find engrish and run away for their lives? Steve kissed Sally for money then left after he kissed her. My dog ate a pig that was extremely large? Eat many pigs so that he cannot see!
I've never seen "Night at the Roxbury." I won't ever see "Night at the Roxbury." The two characters in this film, whose names I'd rather not know, are hilarious in the Saturday Night Live sketches that lended the movie its concept, characters, and principal actors. The problem that I have with this particular film is that it betrays the very concept of the sketches. The sketches were meant to convey the caricature of two assholes at a nightclub bopping way too hard, trying way too hard, and aspiring to womanize but failing at it miserably. As soon as these characters break free of the caricature and begin speaking, as I'm sure they do in this movie, the appeal is lost to me, as is the funny.
During the most recent Super Bowl, a commercial came on tacitly parodying the sketches, and it was funny. It was funny becuase there was no dialogue;
it was a metajoke in the spirit of the original joke. For this, I
applaud the Pepsi Corporation's marketing people.
During the most recent Super Bowl, a commercial came on tacitly parodying the sketches, and it was funny. It was funny becuase there was no dialogue;
it was a metajoke in the spirit of the original joke. For this, I
applaud the Pepsi Corporation's marketing people.
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