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!