5/26/2008

sinuous beauty

5·18·08
we are such a strange phenomena. how is it that we can have so much in common, and simultaneously so much different? how is it that i can share such a great proportion of my interests, desires, concerns with so many people, and yet still remain so disconnected from everyone?

i can see it in your eyes i can taste it in your lips.

the very idea that there exists, or even should exist meaning in life is central to the flaw of religion, and to a greater trend of false confidence, unfounded righteousness and uncountably many sacrifices in the name of false meanings. this is worded so poorly.

im still pretty sure that three man boxing would be pretty fucking awesome.

fighting our way home
why do taboos exist?
it feels like poison, why do you do the things you do?


5·26·08
walk in a circle
trying to find our way home

lets start with ridiculous and move backwards from there.

it seems to me that relativity could be discovered simply by questioning the first principle of absolute space, though this is more obvious in retrospect. it provokes the question of what other first principles that imply an absolute-ness may also exist, and how we might reinterpret them.

i just realized that if the centripetal acceleration due to earth spinning were noticeable at a given latitude, then rather than be pulled straight off the earth, the tendency would be to reorient yourself at an angle, because the centripetal force would be directed perpendicular to the axis of rotation, whereas the force of gravity acts at an angle relative to the latitude and the axis of rotation. this can be seen most easily by imaging standing on or near one of earth's geographic poles, and imaging increasing the rate of rotation so much that it becomes infeasible to stay there, such as on a playground's merry-go-round; the centripetal force at the poles would be directed perpendicular to the force of gravity, and tend to 'pull' you towards the equator of the earth.

science, like anything, requires a lot of practice; when one finds the practice more enjoyable than nearly everything else in their lives, it no longer feels like practice, but rather just pleasure. it is regrettable that i have not experienced much practice in other highly pleasurable activities, especially those involving members of the opposite sex. this inexperience is the primary source of much anxiety, in addition to a natural anxiety that has been hard to pinpoint, very clearly present in even my earliest memories.

in no uncertain terms.

i dont know about you, but if i ever read my fate in a book, i would be overwhelmingly tempted to change it. if only to destroy the situation.

false on your own terms.

all im saying, pretty baby
la la love you, dont mean maybe


i rediscovered the stirling numbers of the second kind while trying to find out what the odds were that after k random samplings of N total items that we would have seen some fraction b/N percentage of the items, where b is the number of unique members we have seen. what ive got at the moment which is mostly done, but maybe not perfectly rigorous or complete is:
P(b/N) = (1/N)^(k-b)*PI(i=0, b-1; (1-i/N))*p(k,b)
where PI(i=0, b-1;(1-i/N)) represents product notation from i=0 to i = b-1, for the quantity (1-i/N)
and p(k,b) represents the stirling number, in my own notation. it can be thought of as the number of ways to have seen b items after k 'queries' (or samples).

this makes me wish i could type LaTeX code here.
guess in time i should swap to wordpress.

5/18/2008

time bomb

remember this one thing.

got hips like cinderella
when youre shaking your good frame

another time, another place.

good news everyone!

my computer told me to 'give the game away' and i thought: well, i already do that.
this is real neat.
undecidable equivalent to independence?

5·15·08
so a few months ago maybe i listened to a man named Chris Hedges on NPR explain his fears of the religious right in america, and it lead to quite a stir of call-ins. one man asked, rhetorically, if repressing the christian right was as flawed as the christian right itself, and Chris did a debatable job of convincing him otherwise. but now i am wondering, is it okay to hate bigotry? this is rhetorical as well, of course. bigotry is, by definition, intolerance. as the famous philosopher of science Karl Popper explained, "...the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."


"Werner Heisenberg [in Physics and Beyond, 1971] recollects a friendly conversation among young participants at the 1927 Solvay Conference about Einstein and Planck's views on religion. Wolfgang Pauli, Heisenberg and Dirac took part in it. Dirac's contribution was a poignant and clear criticism of the political manipulation of religion, that was much appreciated for its lucidity by Bohr, when Heisenberg reported it to him later. Among other things, Dirac said: "I cannot understand why we idle discussing religion. If we are honest - and as scientists honesty is our precise duty - we cannot help but admit that any religion is a pack of false statements, deprived of any real foundation. The very idea of God is a product of human imagination. [...] I do not recognize any religious myth, at least because they contradict one another. [...]" Heisenberg's view was tolerant. Pauli had kept silent, after some initial remarks, but when finally he was asked for his opinion, jokingly he said: "Well, I'd say that also our friend Dirac has got a religion and the first commandment of this religion is 'God does not exist and Paul Dirac is his prophet.'" Everybody burst into laughter, including Dirac.

what effect does curved space time have on olber's paradox?

youre so number one that its a shame that i let other numbers in the game.


5·17·08
i wonder if i could design a device to make water drip out in a more rhythmic pattern. maybe start with a heart beat.

probability ideas:
how many moves would a computer have to watch before it could play the game, relates to how many balls i pick out of the urn before i think ive seen half, or how many balls i pick to talk about the proportions of colors. these feel like 'next generation' probability questions. also seems like these questions can be used to talk about the validity of scientific theory.

whoa, has anyone written QED, or QCD, out in a discrete form? or maybe they are already?

ansatz!

ive always been a little confused as to how gravitational and electrical potentials are gauge symmetric when they both have some sort of conceptual zero... though maybe my flaw is that the conceptual zero i am imagining presupposes some object, which would have to be arbitrary once again. for gravity i imagine it to be the center of mass, where the gravitational potential would once again be zero, but that presupposes mass. for charge i imagine it to be a complete absence of electrons, but that would again, presuppose the existence of positively charged matter. i need to go back to school dammit!

5/13/2008

song of songs

5·9·08
as a very scientifically minded individual, i suspect that i have long differentiated between knowledge and the words used to describe and reference knowledge.

you're a genius.

dont be afraid.
i should take my own advice.

she doesnt know yet i dont have a next level

i just noticed, in the tv show 'dexter', the main character uses the pseudonym 'patrick bateman' to order his anesthetic, revealed when he deletes himself from a short list of privileged individuals for the drug list.

when did lighting candles become more fun than blowing them out?

how does one judge ones own value?

in this TV show i watched, the sister explains to her adopted brother that she doesnt know how it must make him feel that his biological father (whom they both thought had been long dead), was actually alive (not any longer, but longer than previously suspected). it made me think, what would something like that make me feel? although i have no idea, (since i have had no experience even remotely similar), i still suspect that i would not know how it makes me feel, that most likely, like many other things, it would invoke highly contradictory feelings, perhaps of joy and sorrow, longing and satisfaction, betrayal and camaraderie.
this has me wondering, how often do i really know how i feel? how often do i just pick one of the two sides and stick with that? i think im probably a romantic, so i probably take the side of the dichotomy that aligns to that. maybe im not though. in some sense i feel awfully distant, cold, and detached. my methodical nature seems to lend itself to my entrenched ways. whoa, way too much self reflection going on here.


i wonder if i could have pet hummingbirds.
apparently it is illegal oops.
but wait, why?
id like to know more about hummingbirds.

ECGs seem like something cool to learn about too

how many instances of a game, or alternately, how many moves in a single instance of a game, must you observe (and by you i mean the smartest of the smartest intelligences possible), before you can understand and play the game (again, you being whoever, not necessarily you or me).



near and dear, bathed in tears.


dude, i totally miss you.
i totally miss you.
i totally miss you,
all the time.

5/05/2008

present tense makes sense

5·2·08
breathe more deeply.
keep pace with the heartbeat.

i was listening to Dawkin's book, "the god delusion" and he had a really interesting/unfortunate but good point about homeopathy versus established medicine.
he pointed out that placebos are proven to be effective in many instances, but the medical industry is incapable of prescribing them, since due to legal issues they would be required to disclose that its a placebo, and hence defeat the effect. homeopathy on the other hand is unregulated and as such enjoys the freedom to prescribe inactive chemical as cures, which through the placebo effect, often work. which reinforces people's opinions of homeopathic medicine while harming the reputation of mainstream medicine.
i think this is a very good illustration for the difficulty in being 'good'. an enormous criticism of Cheney that i have (and share with many others i believe), is that he actually believes he can remain 'good', while stooping to the levels of his enemies, for some greater good he perceives himself as defending. the difficulty in being the 'good guys' is that you are not allowed to cheat. yes its easier to blow shit up and beat people up and intimidate and extort and bribe and steal and force and slander and threaten and use propaganda and hyperbole, but those are all things we, as a society, have deemed to be 'wrong', in general. committing them in the name of righteousness is, in my opinion, insanity. it is a hypocrisy of morals, which is not only aggravating to those of us with scruples, it is simply illogical.
it is unfortunate the disadvantage placed on science with its sacred honesty when battling the unruly nature of human information transmission.

i think someday maybe id like to visit crater lake and wizard island.
check out the satellite photos on google maps. holy crap that is cool.

holy shit: lake vostok: its about the size of lake ontario, but under 3 km of ice, "Its water is very old, with a mean residence time in the order of one million years (as compared with six years for Lake Ontario, which is typical for lakes of that size)."

i really like the word 'nibble'. as well as its implications and implementation.

im a sucker for a pretty face. and loose sexual standards. (or does 'liberal sexual morals' sound funnier?)
he can feel the Mushroom approaching.
its just like making love: left, down, rotate 62 degrees. engage rotor.

holy fuck science is awesome:
When crumpling sheets of different sizes but made of the same type of paper and with the same aspect ratio (for example, different sizes in the ISO 216 A series), then the diameter of the balls so obtained elevated to a non-integer exponent between 2 and 3 will be approximately proportional to the area of the sheets from which the balls have been made. [1] Creases will form at all size scales (see Universality (dynamical systems)).

crumpled paper at yale.

read the last sentence... dammit, Einstein really was so brilliant. often his 'biggest blunder' is mentioned, which was something he said (it was the cosmological constant). since the cosmological constant is now thought of as necessary, or at least, very likely necessary (actually, i think its pretty well accepted at the moment, though it makes me uneasy), his truly biggest blunder was a failure to accept quantum mechanics, which, since his time, has been verified to such a degree that youd have to be crazy to deny its validity. now, could a more sensical explanation be found that defines the same mathematical framework? or a deeper understanding with mathematics that reduces to the current math in a limit? of course! but if we dont find any such thing, we will still know that the current theory does a better job than anything else has ever. and i dont just mean in particle physics, i mean that, throughout human history, we have never been able to make predictions so precise as we can with current quantum field theories.

reality protocol.

does anyone use 'ttys' for 'talk to you soon'?

though i wont say what, i think it shows our mutual propensity for the avoiding of disturbing others. its something we have in common. its why we are 'nice people'.

i think i have trouble with ambiguity. even if its just like, 'ill call you in half an hour'.

when you walk in a room im a terrible mess.

my middle school graduation just popped into my head. and its pretty funny. i had two teachers, a female english teacher and a male social studies teacher, i think there names were mrs wilson and mr bowen, though i dont remember too clearly. if i remember this correctly, mrs wilson told us graduation was important, because for some of us, we wouldnt graduate high school, and this would be all we would have. meanwhile, mr bowen told us that it was not important, and that it was a waste of time and that we made too big a deal out of it. in retrospect, neither teacher was too encouraging. funny about that, encouragement goes a long way, but they seemed to have over looked it, almost as if they themselves had gotten into a personal argument about the merits (or lack thereof) of a middle school graduation, and had proceeded to press their opinions onto us students. in any case, it would have been nice to have a teacher saying, you guys should be excited about high school, you may have the opportunities to study things that interest you. if you find that high school is lacking that, then maybe you should head straight for college.

it appears i have a previous engagement.

yes im cured. now to get over the cure.
this universe isnt big enough for the both of us.

theres no such thing as 'appropriate'. its not like gravity. we just made it up. it doesnt really exist. funny, or maybe unfortunate, or disturbing, or sad, or ridiculous, how much we all fall into line with it. 'behaving' blindly.

its weird that we have these ideas of sad, happy, and comical, and we tend to think of them as separate; it sometimes makes us feel awkward when we view the blurry line that divides them. i realized this while watching pleasantville the other night. which has to be one of my favorite movies of all time. just an absolutely beautiful movie in so many different ways.

fancy stuff.
vanilla bean.

i want to understand these:
field (physics)
quantum field theory
symmetry in physics

murderology and muderometry.
grand unified school district.





dont be silly, everyone wants to be kissed. even philosophers.

5/01/2008

i disagree with myself

4·27·08
god told me to touch myself.
and you.

trauma can distort the memory.
when i die, i want to be cremated, placed in a coffee can, and then poured all over Jeff Bridges.
youre my escape plan.
in this truly pronking new market

you curled up on me.
hearts & minds

i realized this weekend that anyone who is a proponent of a boltzmann brain has failed to understand natural selection. as Dawkins would say it, the ability of natural selection to 'climb mount improbable' is the reason that boltzmann brains are not in fact more probable than the many brains we observe.

i suppose the distance that separates the informed and thinking from the uninformed and ignorant is growing, and possibly always has been. perhaps they are diverging from one another with ever increasing speed, as it appears almost as if the informed and thinking may be on the verge of yet another series of large breakthroughs, whereas the uninformed are still debating the last set of major breakthroughs. perhaps i am wrong, and this is the way it has always been; the masses trailing behind the highly educated by a few paradigms.
do i sound arrogant? i probably am.

the trouble with everything always is nothings ever just right.

so, matter and energy are the same thing, and time and space are the same thing, and information is what, the relationship between matter-energy and space-time? or probably matter and energy are just a property of space time. and information is a measure of those things. and complexity theory, or computability theory, are the rules of that govern their behavior. yeah, im full of shit all right.

i ought to do it

so im getting back into quantum computing because i want to compute the square root of not. no, i guess i never really lost interest, but im not sure how yet to describe my interests. a mix of quantum computing and physics, but more the physics maybe than the computing? i wish to expand the relationship between information, computation, and physics, with the ultimate goal being to understand the physical world better in terms of information and computation. the manipulation of information? too much 'tion' maybe?

dear Martina Topley-Bird,
i am in love with you. will you marry me?
i wait in anxious anticipation of your response.
truly yours,
cody

imagine that... i can always decrease the likelihood by increasing the details i want reproduced. but obviously if something is physically realizable, it has a non-zero chance of being realized.

thats not funny.
fevered dreams.

ha ha ha ha:
"i wanted to do it cause its fun. its fun to do bad things."

the sky was dark, but you were clear.
doozy
instead of mpg, maybe we should use mile-tons of cargo/gallon.






so far, i have yet to grasp the incomprehensibility of the situation. and this obviously worries me to the bone.