Dynamite to cause avalanches on the slopes

watching the science channel last night, I saw a bit about some folks who cause avalanches for a living. They find likely spots where the terrible snow flows may occur and blast them so that they will give way and clear the danger while no one is in harm's way. I've been watching the news and I feel like some folks are doing the culturally equivalent thing. But I'm not so sure that their intent is as benign. I'm watching the slippery slopes be made much safer to ski by people causing huge calamities that no one seems to notice.

The first one that caught my eye was in Canada. Here a man unsuccessfully tried to get the high court to hear and appeal for the murder of his wife. His appeal was for a lesser charge based on the fact that she had insulted his honor. They refused. Happy ending you may think. But there is a devil in the details. They refused because of the fact that the man had had an affair and that having an affair was the very insult he claimed has sent him into the honor fueled rage. However, I see a great big hanging snow sheet there that's been cleared. Now what happens when a fiery and righteous man comes along with the same claim. Will he receive the lesser sentence? By their logic, he should.

The next one is in the UK. The odious member of the BNP was cleared of charges of race hate. Good guys lose, right? Well, not to their minds. They are considering changing the laws. I'm sure that the last time I read up on rule of law it was the exception that should repeal parts of the existing rules - not create new ones. The broader the reach of these laws that are on their very face based in subjective judgement, the scarier the power of the state becomes. Law should be as cold as possible. The fire belongs in the hearts of the juror and the minds of the trial lawyers. The people should bring the views to the laws. The laws are not the views of the people.

All around people react to extremism with more extremism. Too bad the moon isn't ready for tenants yet.

Man as the Instrument

I am reading Incompleteness. Right now we are making a survey of the positivists and their Vienna Cirle thoughts. I find myself in that hazy place again. It is positivist vs. Platonist; radical empirical vs. realist/idealist (depending on who you talk to). And I wonder where there is room for the common experience in either view? Of course, these are all men of ideas talking about ideas. So perhaps it's natural that they don't have much to say about the place of sweat, blood and tears.

But I always find myself taking the sociologist's view. These men would not be but for the sweat, blood and tears of people that live along with them in their time and countless generations before that. How then can they find themselves discussing what they would deem complete theories of "What Is"(TM) which discount that perspective? Am I too Marxist here? I don't know.

Fugazi says "we need an instrument". I agree. Math is the only thing which seems to come close, but even that we don't understand well enough yet. Our attempts are fumbling at best. Grandiose, beautiful, inspired fumbling - but fumbling none the less.

Of course, you add the lack of instrument to the lack of commonality in the intellectual debate and you get the whole reason religion thrives today long after so many of those intellectuals predicted its demise. God may indeed be dead (in the Nietzschian poetic sense), but the churches remain full regardless. Because the people don't understand the new prophets' words - they preach from high atop Babel.

In the end, religion and god and all those ancient concepts are just an attempt to grasp that instrument. I struggle to help my own children understand the world. It would be great to have an instrument where I could just put it all through a lens and show them. I know there is none. But many grasp and find the same one that has been refined from the assumptions of our forefathers. Ironically, though, in their attempt to make something so grand and all seeing they still inject themselves. The god is always somehow among or of or akin to us in mind or spirit or even body. Man is the instrument again. And there the failure lies...

tunnel

Someone said to me "I can't see the light at the end of the tunnel", and I answered:

There is no light. Learn to love the tunnel. That is the only way. To look for the light is to find oneself stuck forever in becoming and never in being. It is to always try to be somewhere, something else - never to be here and what you are. It is as Yoda says, "Do, or do not. There is no try." It is the tunnel for you, and me, and everyone else. Learn to like the pulsing lights. Learn to love the speed and hugging the sides for speed. Be in the tunnel, or stop. There is no light.

=] I do mean that in a positive way, I assure you. I love my tunnel (most every day).

groovy

NOTE: quoting myself from here.

seed magazine: prime numbers get hitched

Short summary of the article - Mathematicians say to physicists: "We give you all these great tools, you give us nothing. When are you going to pull your weight?" Physicists reply: "We're working on it, but how can physics, which is about reality, contribute to the pure ideal world of math?" Enter one very brave physicist who notes there is a similarity between the patterns in prime numbers and the patters in electron states in atoms. Primes have always been known to show up in patterns. Anyone who has been through high school physics since 1960 know electrons orbit in "shells" (states) where they sit in relation to the nucleus (center) of the atom and that it takes energy (given or taken) to switch from one "shell" to another. Well, it seems that they have been able to use what they know about electrons to make actual verifiable predictions about prime numbers.

Why is this SOOOOOOOOO cool that it makes me tingle every time I say it????

Well, I bet many of you have heard of things like the "golden ratio". It's basically a pattern that you can use to show how things like a conch shell or sunflower will grow. But it was found in nature, and then analyzed. So nature showed this to us and then we brought it into math to analyze. In other words, nothing new was brought to math by it's discovery. The tools of math were just used to describe it.

With these primes and the atomic states, we actually have reality informing us on a completely, until now, abstract issue. Prime numbers have always thought to be something wholly unrelated to anything but the confines of math. If you recall the movie Contact, they are convinced that the message is from an intelligent life-form because it uses primes, and primes are something only intelligence could have used because it has no bearing on anything but the ideal constructs of mathematics - so says the scientists in the movie. But here we have a staggering connection showing that reality may connect to this prime concept in a very deep way.

Were we innately in touch with some deep part of the universe when we discovered, described and manipulated primes? Do we now start looking at all the "pure abstractions" and wondering if they are really just reflections of things we have not yet realized in the world around us? Does this point to a day when we see every thought ever had as part of the natural order because they are all entwined with phenomena at all levels of reality?

Maybe one or all of those questions are completely insane, but before this they were nonsense and now they may just have some standing.

What do you think?

So many things it hurts

So it's been a while. I'm playing hooky from church today. It's a combined service with no religious ed for Sophie, which means 40 minutes struggling to keep her from exploding or making me explode... =] No fun for anyone to be had in that - no good either.

Again, it's been a long while since I've posted. No one seems to know this exists. Of course, I've told no one. So how would they? I still feel I'm missing something about this whole blogging thing.

I've been bursting with ideas lately. Nothing new - meaning the ideas are ones I've mostly has before. I've never written them down. I hope to do some of that here. But I have not yet. Time, time, time, time is always slipping away.

So many things pulse through my mind - mostly about mind. It started when I was reading about Roger Penrose's thoughts on the role quantum mechanics may have in the mind. It makes so much sense to me. The basic idea, which is a result of a wider statement about the role gravity has in the quantum process, says that the scale human thought plays out at may be exactly the range where quantum effects mingle with the macroscopic universe. His idea is that something at small scales can play the quantum games (being in more than one place at once, popping into and out of existence, etc.) because gravity holds no sway at those tiny mass levels. But, it is said, as soon as gravity can hold sway, the multitude of possibilities coalesce into one actuality. I think this would have made Einstein smile. It's so simple. It feels true to me. Penrose goes on to say that this does not rule out quantum effects in things larger than we usually expect. Hence, perhaps quantum probability and hijinks can help explain the mechanics of choice - perchance even free will.

It's a massively appealing idea. Google it and you'll see how many people are buzzing with it. I can't say I've dug into it too much, but it simply feels true. It echos the emergence and multi-layered ideas of mind I've always thought would lead to truth. It also appeals to me because it gives me joy to see that my materialism - materialism that never looked like what most materialists say theirs does - could indeed be right. I've always thought there could be a physics based explanation of mind. I've always believed mind was material - as I believe everything is material. But I have never thought we held all the cards in material's deck before. I still don't think we do. But we have great minds getting closer.

Restart

So I went to Puerto Rico. I remembered that vacations are fun. I remembered that it is good to be in a pool with kids. I remembered that I like to drink a coke in the sun at a poolside bar.

I met an artist and we talked about how her art was like language. I got my wife completely confused between the two gay men in my department of the company, and they don't look all that much alike.

I heard the song of the Coqui, a little frog that is the only one in the world that sings.

I recharged.

It was quite nice. More later...

On Math and Things Real

i is odd, no doubt. For the uninitiated, that is not bad grammar. In this context, 'i' is the grandma of all complex numbers - the square root of -1. Why is that number special? Well, think back to your basic math and you'll recall that any time you multiply a negative by a negative, you get a positive. i.e. -1 x -4 = 4. Now, a square root is the number that, when multiplied by itself, gives you the number being rooted. So the square root of 4 is 2, because 2 x 2 = 4. If you took the case of -2 x -2 you would find that is also 4, positive 4. (The natural question is: does that mean 2 and -2 can both be considered proper square roots of 4? An answer which I don't have, but intuit from context when needed in my readings... most of the time =] )

None of that tells me (directly) why i (the square root of -1) is so special. You see, finding the square root implies that you've found a number that, when multiplied by itself (2 x 2), equals some other number (4). And that square root (2) is then the solution to the question "what is the square root of this (4)?" But if the number you want to find the square root of is -1 (or any negative number, in fact), it can't have a proper square root because you can't have a negative result when you multiply two negative numbers. You can't get a negative by using one negative and one positive, either; because the definition of squaring a number is multiplying the same number by itself (2 x 2 not 2 x -2). So -1 can't have a square root. Well, it can't under the normal rules we're used to. In comes a concept, invented for this very purpose, which allows there to be roots for negative numbers. Or, at least, a root for -1. That number is called 'i'. There is no "number" for it like "5", "7.987374576576", "789/27" or even "π(pi)". Once you have a square root for -1 (and I'll hope you trust me on this), you can have square roots worked out for any negative number.

There is a catch to having all this power, though. You can have your square root for any negative number, but you can never get rid of i. i becomes a basis for a whole set of numbers called "complex numbers" that tend to look like "23.8678678 + 445.766i". Note the presence of i in the number. You'll get that every time. It's because i is something you can't break down. You can manipulate it, though. That's the whole reason it's around. Math dudes needed a way to get around equations that ran into negative roots. So they dreamt up (actually, rigorously proved) the meaning and existence of i (mathematically speaking). What that allowed them to do is do math with these quantities. So if you run into a negative square root in an equation, you simply get it to factor out (which means making it disappear in the mathematical sense) using i (if you can) and then move on. When it was just a negative square root with no context you couldn't do that.

So WHAT??? =]

All this got me to thinking about how it related to things I see in software. I was just training on new products we have (new to me anyway), and we ran into an odd thing. The product can retrieve the structure of queries running in a database; this code is called SQL - Structured Query Language. Well, this SQL code can get quite odd and databases made by IBM don't have the same flavor of oddness as databases made by Microsoft or whomever. We were running the tool against Microsoft's Database (SQL Server 2000 sp3a for the curious), and I got different (incorrect) results than the trainer. After a moments thought, she said "Oh yes, you need to change a setting to get SQL with double quote(") characters in it".

Later on, sitting on this airplane, I was reading about the Riemann Hypothesis (a major mathematical theory). And the author was doing what all good pop-sci and pop-math authors do by giving a refresher for those of us who are not math professionals. He went over the different number families (real numbers, rational numbers, irrational numbers, complex numbers, etc.). And he gave a good explanation of i (somewhat abridged here). What struck me was that he said that i was invented out of need for people to get past restrictions in some equations dealing with negative numbers needing to have square roots. Well, that seemed very like my problem with the software.

I needed to have the software get the SQL from the database. The mathematicians needed to have their equations get the solutions at certain values. In the software problem, there was a condition in the database (the use of the double quotes) which requires the invention of a novel and narrowly applicable solution (the setting in our software) to get over the condition. In the math world, they invent a new number, i, to allow them to deal with the limit in the numbers they have in the context of the equations they'd like to solve. In the software case, the whole thing is a situation wholly invented by people. Math (and the following point is certainly debated but I give my own bias here) is a tool that describes the ideal forms of the world around us - the reduced world. The interesting question for me (and the point of this diatribe) is this:

The software problem existed wholly due to the way the systems were built and approached and some fore-thought on either end would remove the need for the particular solution used. Could there be some more fundamental shift in thought hiding in the number i that would make the need for it go away as well?

In other words, is i just a handy way of dealing with something that is too messy to treat properly? I tend to think in a systems view. Math, the software, the world are all systems. Those systems are different in details for sure, but, as they are all systems, share some general properties with all systems. Whenever we invent some great leap of faith, or sum up some complex idea with a small symbol, are we just shoving some complexity into a neat hidey-hole so we needn't see it anymore instead of tackling head on? Now, to be fair, there have been many man-years spent trying to tackle the nature of i (all puns welcome). My question is more to the nature of solutions that are there merely to be a pass through. No mathematician actually deals with i. They just use it to get rid of something they don't like and get rid of it (i) in the process. It would be as if, finding a quality I didn't like in my dog, I simply trained my dog not to have that quality through using it against the dog (I teach him not to howl at the moon by playing tapes of his howling at the moon to him on a 24 hour loop until he stops). Those solutions don't deal with how the problem arises in the first place.

It doesn't get at the root of the issue (puns again, sorry).

What is the way one deals with these persistent and seemingly unsolvable problems? Don't they point to some lack of deeper understanding? Or are they the sign that our blind grasping at the bounds of knowledge are making contact with the walls in the dark? Are we feeling our way around the room we're bound inside by our minds and senses; only knowing we've struck the wall when these problems hit? And, of course, all we can do is repel off the wall using it's own strength so we can float about the middle of the room again to await the next time we hit a wall. What if we punched the wall all the harder? Or is that a metaphorical number i, trying to solve this issue by simply using mysticism against a mystery? hmmm...

third time's a charm

So I'm in San Fran for the third time. I really like it this time. Maybe it's just that it's been a fun trip, but I have not been impressed by it in the past.

I'm giving up on the topical crap - maybe. It is just silly. This is just really an experiment in ego. Why should I be concerned if people ever even see it? Certainly that should not matter.

I'm trying to stay on East Coast time out here. I've been up since 5am. Watching the sun rise has been very nice. The skyline here looks so clean. I don't know why, but NYC looks dingy by comparison. NYC still looks better, but the clean lines here and the bright colors have a different quality that's nice, too. This is an old city. The (hilarious) cabbie said that the cable cars alone are 130 years old. But it has a look of something that was put here just yesterday.

The cabbie is a story unto himself. German-born, and quite the character. We caught him by a chance - he had passed me by when hailing. But then he turned on his "for hire" light down the street and I ran down to get him. Mike from the UK sat in the cab while Joe from Boston had to be dragged down from the office. We wanted to get Mike a bit of a tour before he left. The cabbie took us to the waterfront and gave s several views of Alcatraz and the Golden Gate - both looked quite nice in the setting sun. He drove us down Lumbard Street (the curvy street) - even though cabs are supposed to be banned. The whole time he was full of jokes and stories. He spent a considerable time telling us how New Yorkers always ask for some ridiculous amount of money back - "They give you a five dollar bill for 3.75 and then ask for a quarter back... why??" We laughed the whole time. In the end, Mike gave him twice the meter. Of course, as he was about to pull away, I leaned in and asked him for a quarter. I could have planned a tour for weeks and it wouldn't have been a smidgen as fun as that was.

So far so good. I've been writing in this thing often enough. Maybe I'll actually tell some people it's here soon.

Give them something to talk about

So I'm just home from church and again no comments on the blog. I suppose I shouldn't have expected any in a mere 29 hours (give or take). Of course, one always feels that the minute you put something out there the masses will rush to admire and interact with it. That's the whole impulse which drives this blog thing, isn't it? Or maybe I have that wrong - or I've generalized something quite particular?

At church today we read an amazing passage. Of course, I found the text to it on someone else's blog :

To Worship

To worship is to stand in awe under a heaven of stars,
before a flower, a leaf in sunlight, or a grain of sand.

To worship is to be silent, receptive,
before a tree astir with the wind,
or the passing shadow of a cloud.

To worship is to work with dedication and with skill;
it is to pause from work and listen to a strain of music.

To worship is to sing with the singing beauty of the earth,
it is to listen through a storm to the still small voice within.

Worship is a loneliness seeking communion;
it is a thirsty land crying out for rain.

Worship is kindred fire within our hearts;
it moves through deeds of kindness and through acts of love.

Worship is the mystery within us reaching out to the mystery beyond. This is

It is an inarticulate silence yearning to speak;
it is the window of the moment open to the sky of the eternal.

--Jacob Trapp (#441 in Singing in the Living Tradition)

This is the whole reason I do this Unitarian thing. It draws on this simple wonderment I want to be sure my children have a source to learn about. I know that if I just try and teach this to them in my own way, I'll end up forcing them into my view as much as I was forced into the priests' views as a kid. This simple expression of the feeling when you get when you stare deeply into the face of the universe is the kind of thing I want my kids to hear - and to hear from someone other than me. I want them to be able to think it over and, if they want, talk to me about it.

Parents are supposed to teach their kids, for sure. But where are the limits? I feel they are very tight. I feel that much need to be learned from the community at large. Many folks leave this to TV these days. I didn't want that. I wanted them to have a chance to see and hear what people think - what many other people think. In fact, as many other people as possible. Is that shirking? Is that right? Is that something else all together?

An original thought

Well, the first thought here, anyway. So I'm 45 minutes away from yoga and sitting here in front of the computer not very sure why I'm starting a blog. The interface doesn't work very well here on my mac and I have nothing resembling an original thought to put out there. However, since this is all the rage, I figured I'd give it a try.

Should I bother?

Should anyone?