1/20/2007

and the next thing i know

how fucking bizarre is that? my brain enjoyed watching my phone slide down my backpack after i threw it onto my bed, just like it enjoys following the curves of girls.

i intend to keep my life in a constant state of change; moving furniture every few days, cutting hair every few weeks. changing walls changing thoughts changing opinions. ill speak in tongues ill speak in metaphors. someday im going to ask a girl to incorporate, one way tickets behind my back. also, im growing an ego. i intend for it to mature sometime this semester. it would be wonderful if people played along and helped me educate the beast as it matured.

heres a relatively simple question: how cold would i have to make a single ice cube so that it could freeze an entire glass of water which was both at room temperature and in a room temperature environment? is it even possible?

heres a question im not sure how to answer, for corey: if the great wall of china were made out of a magnificently bright light, would it be visible from space?

and the next thing i know, im walking through customs with a condom full of coke in my colon. and you say, SAME THING HAPPENED TO ME! NOT GUILTY!

these are two beautiful statements made by Scott Aaronson:
"What I’m trying to say, Bill, is this: you can go ahead and indulge yourself. If some of the most brilliant unbelievers in history — Einstein, Erdös, Twain — could refer to a being of dubious ontological status as they would to a smelly old uncle, then why not the rest of us? For me, the whole point of scientific rationalism is that you’re free to ask any question, debate any argument, read anything that interests you, use whatever phrase most colorfully conveys your meaning, all without having to worry about violating some taboo. You won’t endanger your immortal soul, since you don’t have one."

"Two other perfect examples of "obvious-in-retrospect" theories are evolution and special relativity. Admittedly, I don't know if the ancient Greeks, sitting around in their togas, could have figured out that these theories were true. But certainly -- certainly! -- they could've figured out that they were possibly true: that they're powerful principles that would've at least been on God's whiteboard when She was brainstorming the world."

Scott also had a humerous way to solve np-complete problems in polynomial time if the universe follows the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics: "first guess a random solution. then, if its wrong, kill yourself! technicality: if there are no solutions, youre out of luck!" maybe whoever reads me wont find that funny, but i thought it was hilarious, and ingenious.

a few weeks ago with matt, i began to wonder, could time travel be shown impossible through violations of conservation laws? and even more so, through violation of the second law of thermodynamics? surely if you could go back in time like doc brown and marty mcfly then you would violate the law of conservation of matter (or more generally energy), but wouldnt you have more seriously violated a law of information or order in the universe, by bringing your highly complex machine, (or even you yourself being a highly complex machine) without having generated the necessary disorder to obey the law? i think this might be a question worth posing to smarter individuals than myself.

the vast majority of human behavior, from ancient history up until present day, makes very little to no sense to me. how bizarre we are. how little sense we make. scott says indulge yourself. and he is correct.

when i was little i suspected that adults might have some secret that they all knew and all kept from children. i wasnt sure what exactly the secret was, i didnt really even have a guess, it was more that had a guess they had the secret, but never speculated on what the secret was. to some degree, the secret does exist, although it is not a grand conspiracy as much as a naivety among adults; children dont really know much about the real world, i dont think. or at least i didnt.
when i was little and they told us in school that we shouldnt do drugs, i would stay up at night and wonder if maybe i had done drugs that made me forget i had done them.
it only occurred to me a few months ago that these sort of things might not have happened to every kid. it has only occurred to me over the last few months that maybe a lot of the things about the world that i take for granted, about people and society, and behavior, are not viewed in the same way by most people. in retrospect, i must have been a relatively paranoid little kid.

it seems to me that human interaction should be within the realm of mathematical modeling.

how long would you wait on hold before hanging up?

i want to keep myself on my toes. which is why i am turning my apartment into a very serious fire hazard. FIRE HAZARD.

visible only to those who know where to look.

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