Ohida: 04.06

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I Had A Dream...

Last night I had a dream. I dreamt I accidentally put on Grandpa Bob's glasses instead of my own, and the next thing I knew, I was the President of the United States. (I never knew it was so easy - I didn't even have to spend time campaigning!) Perhaps it would better to say I was the Emperor/Augustus of the United States - in my dream I had a rubber stamp Congress and the mandate of the people behind me.

In my dream, I was very pleased with myself. I remember that I was trying to relocate the nation of Israel to Connecticut. I'm not sure why Connecticut, except that it had to be a costal region so it wouldn't be a landlocked nation surrounded by the U.S. I recall that I thought I might get some grief from the good people of Connecticut, but in the end I was certain it would save lives and possibly avert another World War.

I remember deciding to apologize to the rest of the world on behalf of the United States. I never actually had to do the apologizing, but I'd come to the conclusion it had to be done, much like one has to apologize to their spouse even when you are absolutely sure you are not wrong, just because the peace and love of your spouse is worth more to you than being right.

I planned to implement the Fair Tax.

I planned to recommend school vouchers to the states, to recommend trade schools or college preperatory schools replace high schools, and to reward teachers for students who do more than succeed instead of punishing them for students who fail.

I planned to return to states' rights.

I found it strange, as I thought over my dream on the way to work, that it was so lucid and political. I found it strange that I was considering all of these things while waiting for a fishing boat on the edge of a lake in the early morning. There were egrets.

I found it especially strange that there was no extreme failure in my dream. Nearly all of my memorable dreams involve some kind of failure or embarrassment or posing on my part. This one was not that way. Interesting.

A Further Inheritance of Flowers

Here are a few more blossoms from around the yard that we can claim no credit for, but we enjoy seeing them for the few years they will survive without encouragement.

And, Look! The Japanese Maples are taking color again.

Jesus Movies!

Kim and I did not celebrate Jesus' second birthday in a traditional way (though we did eat candy and dye eggs) - we went to the theaters and watched movies! We haven't seen many movies in the theaters lately, so we were both fairly excited.

First we saw V is for Vendetta. Given its [R] rating and the penchant for gore and disturb-your-audience-oneupmanship that seems to run around Hollywood these days, I was prepared for a movie I would have to cover my eyes through, but not at all. I was also prepared for something more explicitly anti-Administration, but I should have known better - where there is the smell of smoke, only rarely is there a bonfire. I thought it was good movie, with an interesting plot, engrossing action and dialogue, and persuasive acting. It was visually stimulating. Trickles of the Phantom of the Opera mythos served it well. I recommend it, and I think Kim would, too.

We also watched Thank you for Smoking, which I perhaps enjoyed even more, and Kim did not seem to enjoy at all. I thought it was funny, witty, and didn't hit me over the head with any kind of message, though I was sitting beneath Damocles' sword until the end. Kim didn't like it because there wasn't a moral, and the ending wasn't particularly bright and cheery and didn't wrap everything up. So maybe I'm giving extra credit to movies that I wanted to like and that didn't disappoint me in a way I expected to. But I would recommend Smoking as well, though there's no reason not to wait for the DVD.

Link: How to Deconstruct Almost Anything

I read this aricle long ago and found it quite funny, but I lost the link. Here it is again. Yay!

From the Article (for lack of a better snippet):

Of course, no real deconstruction would be like this. I only used a single paragraph and avoided literary jargon. All of the words will be found in a typical abridged dictionary and were used with their conventional meanings. I also wrote entirely in English and did not cite anyone. Thus in an English literature course I would probably get a D for this, but I already have my degree so I don't care.

Another minor point, by the way, is that we don't say that we deconstruct the text but that the text deconstructs itself. This way it looks less like we are making things up.

Link: A conversation with God

It's not short, but it is concise. This is a very interesting read. I suspect Todd, in particular would like it, though I'm not mindreader and could be wrong.

Ampersand

I think the ampersand is especially cool in this font:

&

It's a little funny-looking as an ampersand, but it's quite cool as a product of its lineage.

The ampersand, it turns out, is a short-hand version for (a conjunction of) the latin "Et".

Can you see it? Isn't that cool, or am I weird? (Or Both!)

Ruminations: Time Travel

There's been some speculation lately that time travel may indeed be possible to some degree or another, and that within our own lifetimes, people, not just particles, would be able to travel as well.

Of course the problem with time travel is the grandfather paradox. Could you go back in time and kill your own grandfather before your parents were born? If so, then you would have never existed, and your grandfather wouldn't have been killed, allowing you to be born so you could go back and kill your grandfather (poor grandpa!). Since the popularization of quantum theory, the solution to this problem has been parallel universes, or the so-called multiverse. Whenever more than one thing could happen, both do, each its it own universe. When two universes differ only very slightly, they might recombine, but in general, each second that goes generates a partial infinity of new universes. So if you went back in time and killed your own grandfather, you would simply generate a new universe, and you would have essentially moved from one universe (in which you did exist) to another (in which you would not have, except that your time machine brought you there). Viola - no paradox.

This concept saddens me somewhat, because even if time travel were to ever become a reality, we wouldn't learn anything from it. Any time traveller who went into the past, whether he killed his grandfather or not, would inevitably create enough change that he would only be able to move forward in a different universe; from our perspective, he would be lost. He might return to a time when another version of us exists, but we would never see him again or learn anything he learned.

Travellers to the future might return to their own universe, but we would have no way to know reliably that the future they visited is the same universe we'll end up in - the further into the future they go, the less likely it is that we'll manage our way into that same universe (that's not so sad, though - at least we can get our chrononaut back.)

We can be reasonably confident that we currently live in a universe that no time travellers from another universe might return to, because there were no time travellers in our past (unless they were very, very discreet). At least in this model, research into time travel does us no good.

I recently finished reading Time Enough for Love (review-in-brief: Good (Author is Heinlein: Double-good!)), and part of the story has the character time-travelling back to his past. Granted, when he wrote the story (1973), multiversing was really thought about too much (definitely not by me), and though Heinlein himself would go on to write novels exploring the idea, it's not really dealt with in that novel. Instead, the way he deals with the possibility of the paradox is with a kind of "post-destination" - paradoxes won't happen because they didn't happen. I don't travel back and kill my grandfather because he didn't die that way. Or if he was killed by a mysterious stranger and I turn out to be the one, maybe he was wearing the horns at the time. It's not that there is some kind of deus-ex-machina magic to prevent you from doing it, just the simple fact that what happened in the past happened in the past, and that didn't happen.

It's like pre-destination (which many scientists and philosophers supported as the only rational theory, both before and after Quantum theory), except we are also privy to the destination.

Perhaps this is an obvious concept to many, but I found it somewhat comforting when it finally worked it's way into my head, especially as I find it, as a theory, equally plausible (and perhaps more so from an Occamite point of view) with the multiverse. Time travellers needn't stress themselves over stepping on the wrong bug or saying the wrong thing to someone else - the universe has already taken care of itself. Of course, they should be careful not to get themselves killed, but they should worry too much about accidentally running over Grandpa. (Which makes me wonder - how would the statute of limitations work on a crime committed in the past?)

One could conceivably extend the same sense of peace to the present. Today's present is tomorrow's post-destination - whatever happens will have happened tomorrow, and from that perspective, is inevitable. Try not to get yourself killed or make the girls cry, but for goodness' sake, relax a little!

Huzzah! Yardwork begins again

It's now officially spring, which unofficially means I have to get cracking or the yard will swallow the house inside of a month.

I had a load of things I wanted to do this weekend, not in the least mow down the foot-high weeds springing up in our yard. Why scientists can't engineer a strain of weed to look like grass, I don't know. But weeds will spring up to knee-high in just about a week while our grass is still dormant and brown. Oh well.

I had to put off mowing on Sunday, since the tail-end of the storm that had produced tornados elsewhere in the county was still loitering and keeping the grass wet. I figured it was the perfect time to dig into the nice, soft earth and pull out a few feisty bushes that thumbed their nose at me after I had "killed" them last year. That, and finally dig out that stump in the middle of the backyard that had been staring at me since we moved in. To my surprise, I actually succeeded in getting the stump out, but not before giving my back a good tweaking. I had to kind of crawl-drag the stump over to the woodpile in the back in the end, but that's what it took to be triumphant.

So I slept with one of those nifty hot wraps, and I woke up feeling no worse when I went to bed, which meant that as long as I stood perfectly upright (or what feels like perfectly upright, but looks more like a half-straightened paperclip) and swung my right leg around instead of lifting it up like a normal person, I could move around quite handily. (This is what comes of not staying in any kind of shape.)

But the day was beautiful, the yard was a wheatfield in the making, and I couldn't count on having a chance to mow next weekend. So I pulled out the lawnmower, gritted my teeth, and gave the starter a yank. Puh, puh, puh. Yank. Puh, puh, puh.

Okay. I primed the engine again and yanked. Puh, puh, puh. I thought maybe it just took a lot of tries after being stored for the winter. (Yank; puh, puh, puh)*(~25). That's when I came upstairs and my good friend the internet told me something that probably everyone else knows, but having never winterized a gas-engine before, I didn't. You have to drain the gas out of an engine the last time you use it in the fall, or the gas goes bad and can gum up the carburetor, which is really expensive to fix. Oh.

Since my back was already whining about all of the yanking and jostling, I thought about calling it an expensive $200 lesson and getting another lawnmower, but I can't throw money around like that, and beside, I'm trying to work on that whole "giving up too easily" fault. So I did a little more digging around, and someone suggested emptying the gas tank, priming the lines as clear as you could, letting it dry out, and trying a new tank of gas. So I did that. For good measure, I got high-octane gas and one of those cleaner additives that's supposed to help clean out carburetors and fuelinjectors. I tightened the gas cap back up, and gave it a yank. Puh, pabrrrrrrrrrr! Huzzah!

So, half an hour later, swinging around the yard like Lurch and watching for the false steps from the dips and holes we have, I have officially begun the season of yardwork. Yay!

Link: NSA conducting promiscuous wiretapping with the help of AT&T

From the article:

What is the Significance and Why Is It Important to Bring These Facts to Light?

Based on my understanding of the connections and equipment at issue, it appears the NSA is capable of conducting what amounts to vacuum-cleaner surveillance of all the data crossing the Internet -- whether that be peoples' e-mail, Web surfing or any other data.

Link: Why women have breasts

From the article:

In peacocks, however, the males are the pretty ones. In humans, somehow this is reversed: women are the pretty ones, and men are all astonishingly ugly. In most species, the females are the replicators, and must be sensible about camouflage and the like, and so can't afford to be showy, but even if most of the males die because of their hampering plumage, this doesn't matter, since those left can fertilise all the females, and will probably have the best genes anyway, since they managed to survive. This occurs in its most extreme form in species where the males play little or no part in the rearing of offspring. Humans have fairly high male parental investment, however, and so the males are more valuable, and as said before, mortality due to predation in adult females, even those hampered by udders, would be so low, that this rule could in humans be sex-reversed.

Link: Supreme Court case establishes the boundaries of "No-Knock" raids

I've decided to start doing what a lot of people do with their blogs - post links to interesting things I've read. But I'll try to preface my posts with "Link" so you can avoid reading such posts, if you're so inclined.

From the article:

Sometime this spring, the Supreme Court will hand down its decision in the case of Hudson v. Michigan. At issue is whether or not police who used an illegal "no-knock" raid to enter a defendant's home can use the drugs they seized inside against the defendant at trial. To understand the importance of this case, some background is in order.

As the name indicates, a "no-knock" raid occurs when police forcibly enter a private residence without first knocking and announcing that they're the police. The tactic is appropriate in a few limited situations, such as when hostages or fugitives are involved, or where the suspect poses an immediate threat to community safety. But increasingly, this highly confrontational tactic is being used in less volatile situations, most commonly to serve routine search warrants for illegal drugs.

Oh, and the link to the article is in the post title.

Follow-up Link
Sometimes puppies are the victims, too.

I was watching Equilibrium the other day, and I remember thinking out strange it was that the director shows in every graphic detail people being killed, and nobody (including myself) bats an eye. But when it came time for the dogs to be shot, he cut away. Strange.