Fake physics

Attention comes from points with nonzero curl in the noetic flux.

What's the wavelength of an attention? (uh-TEN-tee-ON)

Helping

Do you suppose that Newton had a buddy who suggested to him, over coffee, "Hey, maybe you should invent a new kind of math for that. You know, some way to talk about sums of infinitesimal things." Would we hear about that guy?

I wouldn't mind being that guy, even if we didn't.

phase-space

The phase-space of life is riddled with obstacles and currents. Our course through it is not simple. Bedeviling our navigation are the twin facts that we do not know our destination, and that our charts were drawn by madmen.

Ritual

The idea of the salt trick (the original idea, anyway) is finding the mental trick to get myself to do the things I need to do. Algorithms for human living.

Ritual seems to be a useful tool. The tea ritual gets good results pretty often. I'm hoping it's more the ritual than the drugs in the tea (theobromine? [edit: nope, theophylline]). I don't want to be dependent on drugs.

I once applied the tea ritual to my job, and good things came of it. I'm reluctant to do that regularly, though.

My deep fear, and I think I rationally support this, too, is that if I became successful at my job, I might forget to worry about, and put effort into, things which are more important.

Art

A bad artist who doesn't know any better will point to Picasso, or Monet, or van Gogh, to defend his bad art. You can't limit art with your narrow definitions, he'll say.

It's true; great art defies rules. This is because art is so richly complex a concept that any clean and rigorous definitions we try to come up with for it will be hopelessly naive. We're not smart enough to correctly draw boundaries for art. Every time somebody has set rules, a great artist has come along and broken them.

So we cannot set rules on art, yes?

Here's the problem: bad artists can break rules, too.

The reason we try at all to set rules is so that we can tell good stuff from crap. We're pretty sure there is a difference between good stuff and crap. So we try to decide what that difference is. When we've come up with an answer, though, it's always been wrong, or at least shortsighted.

But just because we can't codify our standards doesn't mean we should pretend we don't have any.

What do do?

Art isn't alone in this. There are many kinds of endeavor which fall into a problematic category: an endeavor that almost definitely has value, and ought to be undertaken, but the practice of which either cannot or should not be quantitatively evaluated regarding its value. Art falls into this category. So does education. So does philosophy. So do many things.

With any of these things, we end up, at any particular point in history, either trying to constrain it with ridiculous rules, or allowing it to produce huge quantities of utter crap. Sometimes we get creative and manage to do both at the same time.

I have a daydream that there exists a possible solution to this dilemma. I keep trying to figure out what it is.

I'm probably being shortsighted.

But it would be nice if we, as a civilization, knew how to talk frankly about the difference between breaking the rules because the rules are wrong, and breaking the rules because you suck.

Neologism Needed

Suppose you could come up with a field of mathematics that is to graph theory what the calculus is to arithmetic. I think that when we find a proper understanding of quantum mechanics, that new field of mathematics will be the language it's expressed in.

Look at a Feynman diagram; it's a graph.

What If

You theists say that there is an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God in charge of the Universe. The implication is that that's a good thing.

You atheists say there isn't.

What if you're both partly right?

What if there is no omnibenevolent God in charge of the universe...

...but there should be?

If that were the truth, neither one of your viewpoints would take us in the right direction.

Why You Can't Use Entanglement To Make An Ansible

I've been disappointed that I didn't grok why you couldn't use entanglement to make an ansible, so I asked around on the Viable Paradise Yahoo! Group, and got some insight. Thanks to Laura, Meredith, Calvin, and Leo.

Here's what I've got in my head:

In order to transmit information, one party must set (that is, determine) a property of the universe, and another must read (that is, measure) that same property. When each party is in possession of one particle of an entangled pair, neither party can set any entangled state of the particles (like, say, spin). One party (A) can set the property whether-the-waveform-has-collapsed-yet, by reading any of the entangled states, but the other party (B) can't read that same collapsed-yet property; B can only read the entangled state, which is something A didn't set. So even though the two particles might be said to be communicating with each other instantaneously, the two people who have them can't.

I'm not sure if I've got it right, but it feels good to think that I grok it.

To-do

A to-do list is like a sun. When enough stuff collects in one place, it can spark to life, and produce energy, and fuel interesting processes. But above a certain size and beyond a certain age, its own weight turns against it. More stuff goes in than gets out. Eventually it collapses on itself, withdraws beyond its own event horizon, and becomes irrelevant, and nothing can escape from it save in the occasional random quantum event.

Contraspectivism

There's a thought I have. I've tried to put it into words. I've tried to write it down. But every time I try, I think, "Not good enough. I'll try again later."

But I may never get it right. So I'll cut and paste what I have now:

Every concept in philosophy has a scope to which it properly belongs. A realm of discourse within which it is appropriate. Free will belongs to the subjective scope, the discussion of what it's like to be a finite imperfect being. Determinism belongs to the objective scope, the discussion of abstract and complete reality. The confusion between free will and determinism comes of failing to keep the scope of each concept in mind. That's my position. I call it contraspectivism.

There I go, making up words again.

Burqa

I have ridiculed those who force their women to wear the burqa. But I am as wrong as they are: A burqa baffles only the eyes.

For a bad man, a woman modest to his eyes can be naked in his heart, and for a good man, a woman naked to his eyes can be modest in his heart.

What matters is not whether your wife is surrounded by more or less cloth, but whether she is surrounded by good or bad men.

East or west, sun or rain, any man who points at a people not his own and condemns it for the attire of its women should look not to the eyes of his fellow men, but to their hearts.

The new meme: LOLyers!

In other news, today entertainment industry lawyers brought piracy suits in federal court against three gravestones, a puppy, and a traffic light.

Making Tea Now

I want to tell you that I've changed the way I make tea since my earlier post on the subject. It's been evolving fitfully, and only reached the state I'm about to describe a few days ago.

Darn Douglas Noel Adams (DNA on h2g2) and his milk molecules.

On my desk I now have a Bodum half-liter teapress teapot, a stirring implement, a quiet kitchen timer, and a 2-cup Pyrex measuring cup. In one desk drawer I have a tin of Tealuxe Irish Breakfast looseleaf tea and a plastic teaspoon. In another drawer, I have a box of 16-ounce Solo hot beverage paper cups and lids. In the coffee nook across the cubeway from where I sit are a spring water cooler/heater, a microwave, a mini-fridge containing half-and-half and a tiny ice tray, and a little squeezy plastic jar of honey.

Here's what I do: I open the desk drawer, get out the tin and spoon, and scoop two heaping teaspoons of leaves into the teapress. I take the teapress and measuring cup to the coffee nook. I fill the Pyrex with one and three-quarters cups of water from the hot spigot, put it in the microwave, and press Quick Min and Start. I wait, worrying what leaking microwaves are doing to my gametes. Sometimes I go fetch a cup and lid during this wait, but I only have a minute and I have to be there and ready right when the microwave beeps. If I'm five seconds late, the water in the Pyrex has stopped bubbling, and Douglas tells me, "the water has to be boiling (not boiled) when it hits the tea leaves." So when the microwave beeps, I take out the Pyrex promptly, pull out the teapress's steeper insert ('cause otherwise the water flows out through the pores and carries particulates with it), pour in the bubbling water, and quickly lower the steeper back in. I take the teapress (caution: hot!) and Pyrex (also hot!) back to my desk and set them on my tea napkin. The tea napkin is just a folded paper towel dedicated to the purpose of absorbing drips, not a specially-purchased product. I'm not sick. I start the timer, which is programmed for 4 minutes and 40 seconds. Sometimes I put the press part of the teapress in, sometimes not; it sinks and thus cuts the number of open pores through which tea liquor can flow (or through which tea particles can diffuse; I guess both things are happening), which bugs me, but then I've heard you're supposed to cover it while it steeps. While the timer counts down, I go back to the coffee nook. If I didn't bring a cup before, I do now. I squeeze about a teaspoon of honey onto the flat paper bottom of the cup. No, not upside-down, silly, right side up. I know that my phrasing might be confusing. I just say it that way because when I watch the thick honey blob spreading on the coated paper, I think of it as on a flat surface, not in a concave space. I take the cup back to my desk. When the timer goes off, I press the press part of the teapress. I pour the hot tea into the cup, onto the now spread-out honey. The tea pushes up little irregular circular ridges in the honey. I assemble my stirrer; I stick a plastic coffee-stirrer onto the end of a wooden stick that once held rock-candy, because the plastic stirrer isn't long enough. I stir the honey in until the bottom of the cup doesn't feel gooey. This involves reversing direction several times. I stick the end of the stirrer in my mouth and pull out the wood while sucking to get drops of tea out of the stirrer. Then I take the cup back to the coffee nook. No one has questioned why I make so many trips, but it's only a matter of time. I take out the ice tray and pop five or so little cubes out of it. If the cubes are reluctant to come, I use the point of the small blade of my Swiss Army knife to pry them. The top of the microwave provides a platform at just the right height that I don't have to unclip the lanyard from my belt loop. I fill the empty pockets with water from the cold spigot, and replace the tray in the freezy compartment of the fridge, carefully aligning it with the little ridges through which the coolant flows. I stir the ice cubes into the hot honeyed tea until they melt. This is enough to bring the temperature of the tea down near room temperature. Do I use the same stirrer? No. I'm too lazy or forgetful to have brought it along. So I grab one out of the cardboard box in the coffee nook, and chuck it when I'm done. Wasteful. I add half-and-half. Too much for my health, probably. Almost a quarter cup. Also, the English insist milk, not cream. Whatever. I sip. Wow, that's good. I mean, really, wow. I get what DNA was trying to convey. I return to my desk humming. I put the lid on. For some reason I don't drink immediately. It's as though I'm reluctant. Or I don't feel I deserve it yet. Or I'm not ready. If I was smart, I ate something substantial before I began this process. I mentally gird my loins, and open a blank page to type into, and I drink the tea. All of it. Usually in one go, sometimes I pause in the middle and make it two. Either way the majority of the tea flows into me in under a minute. I get high. I write. Or something; the recollection is unclear.

If you read the earlier post on tea, you'll recognize that all of this allows me what is quite possibly British Kitchen-quality tea, in an American Cubicle setting.

Now I have to clean up tea leaves.

I cry sometimes when I think that, no matter how well I succeed or how badly I fail as a writer, I will never get to meet Douglas Adams.

Monkey knuckles

In Ursula K. Le Guin's Steering the Craft, she has exercises for the writer. Exercise one is playing with the sound of words. For the full description, see the book. Here goes:

Sitting sipping tea.
Fussing fingers typing types.
Precise and neat and tidy.
Taptaptap slap ding!
Zephyrs in my frizzy flutter.
Taptaptaptap ding! Taptap.

But rustle crash! That doesn't go.
The zephyr window yawns and not a breeze comes through, but monkeys! monkeys!
Here they come!
Slap not the ding, but handy feet
scatter crumbs and toast aside.
Monkey butts upon my page. Monkey knuckles thump the butter!
Tea a stream, and dripping down.
Tapping typer mouth an O.

And then no more. The window out.
And screeching swinging bellies go.
All grinning laughs and happy hands.
Another cup to turn.

- read this aloud, with an audience

(I know the taps and dings don't match how a typewriter actually works. Bite me.)