See Around Corners

That is so much a wonderful difficult philosophical question - what happens if we walk right past the meaning of our life because we can't see it - for so many reasons? Do we ever really know what is the real meaning for us, ever, whenever anything may happen? Is it all just plain guess work, that whatever choice we make at any point in time can be completely invalidated by the next moment in time? Do we just keep going, on the obviously invalid assumption that what our life is to be and what we need in life is just around the corner, on the assumption that we pretend that we can see around corners?

This leads to both good and bad conclusions (of course, there are no such things as good or bad conclusions - only the perception and appreciation of conclusions from our own perspective). But, it certainly also just leads to life leading on to more life.

Risk? What Risk?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/29/science/29collider.html?pagewanted=1&_r=3&hp

 

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March 29, 2008

Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More

By DENNIS OVERBYE

More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice.

None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.

Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure.

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has bothered scholars and scientists in recent years — namely how to estimate the risk of new groundbreaking experiments and who gets to decide whether or not to go ahead.

The lawsuit, filed March 21 in Federal District Court, in Honolulu, seeks a temporary restraining order prohibiting CERN from proceeding with the accelerator until it has produced a safety report and an environmental assessment. It names the federal Department of Energy, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the National Science Foundation and CERN as defendants.

According to a spokesman for the Justice Department, which is representing the Department of Energy, a scheduling meeting has been set for June 16.

Why should CERN, an organization of European nations based in Switzerland, even show up in a Hawaiian courtroom?

In an interview, Mr. Wagner said, “I don’t know if they’re going to show up.” CERN would have to voluntarily submit to the court’s jurisdiction, he said, adding that he and Mr. Sancho could have sued in France or Switzerland, but to save expenses they had added CERN to the docket here. He claimed that a restraining order on Fermilab and the Energy Department, which helps to supply and maintain the accelerator’s massive superconducting magnets, would shut down the project anyway.

James Gillies, head of communications at CERN, said the laboratory as of yet had no comment on the suit. “It’s hard to see how a district court in Hawaii has jurisdiction over an intergovernmental organization in Europe,” Mr. Gillies said.

“There is nothing new to suggest that the L.H.C. is unsafe,” he said, adding that its safety had been confirmed by two reports, with a third on the way, and would be the subject of a discussion during an open house at the lab on April 6.

“Scientifically, we’re not hiding away,” he said.

But Mr. Wagner is not mollified. “They’ve got a lot of propaganda saying it’s safe,” he said in an interview, “but basically it’s propaganda.”

In an e-mail message, Mr. Wagner called the CERN safety review “fundamentally flawed” and said it had been initiated too late. The review process violates the European Commission’s standards for adhering to the “Precautionary Principle,” he wrote, “and has not been done by ‘arms length’ scientists.”

Physicists in and out of CERN say a variety of studies, including an official CERN report in 2003, have concluded there is no problem. But just to be sure, last year the anonymous Safety Assessment Group was set up to do the review again.

“The possibility that a black hole eats up the Earth is too serious a threat to leave it as a matter of argument among crackpots,” said Michelangelo Mangano, a CERN theorist who said he was part of the group. The others prefer to remain anonymous, Mr. Mangano said, for various reasons. Their report was due in January.

This is not the first time around for Mr. Wagner. He filed similar suits in 1999 and 2000 to prevent the Brookhaven National Laboratory from operating the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. That suit was dismissed in 2001. The collider, which smashes together gold ions in the hopes of creating what is called a “quark-gluon plasma,” has been operating without incident since 2000.

Mr. Wagner, who lives on the Big Island of Hawaii, studied physics and did cosmic ray research at the University of California, Berkeley, and received a doctorate in law from what is now known as the University of Northern California in Sacramento. He subsequently worked as a radiation safety officer for the Veterans Administration.

Mr. Sancho, who describes himself as an author and researcher on time theory, lives in Spain, probably in Barcelona, Mr. Wagner said.

Doomsday fears have a long, if not distinguished, pedigree in the history of physics. At Los Alamos before the first nuclear bomb was tested, Emil Konopinski was given the job of calculating whether or not the explosion would set the atmosphere on fire.

The Large Hadron Collider is designed to fire up protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts before banging them together. Nothing, indeed, will happen in the CERN collider that does not happen 100,000 times a day from cosmic rays in the atmosphere, said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a particle theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

What is different, physicists admit, is that the fragments from cosmic rays will go shooting harmlessly through the Earth at nearly the speed of light, but anything created when the beams meet head-on in the collider will be born at rest relative to the laboratory and so will stick around and thus could create havoc.

The new worries are about black holes, which, according to some variants of string theory, could appear at the collider. That possibility, though a long shot, has been widely ballyhooed in many papers and popular articles in the last few years, but would they be dangerous?

According to a paper by the cosmologist Stephen Hawking in 1974, they would rapidly evaporate in a poof of radiation and elementary particles, and thus pose no threat. No one, though, has seen a black hole evaporate.

As a result, Mr. Wagner and Mr. Sancho contend in their complaint, black holes could really be stable, and a micro black hole created by the collider could grow, eventually swallowing the Earth.

But William Unruh, of the University of British Columbia, whose paper exploring the limits of Dr. Hawking’s radiation process was referenced on Mr. Wagner’s Web site, said they had missed his point. “Maybe physics really is so weird as to not have black holes evaporate,” he said. “But it would really, really have to be weird.”

Lisa Randall, a Harvard physicist whose work helped fuel the speculation about black holes at the collider, pointed out in a paper last year that black holes would probably not be produced at the collider after all, although other effects of so-called quantum gravity might appear.

As part of the safety assessment report, Dr. Mangano and Steve Giddings of the University of California, Santa Barbara, have been working intensely for the last few months on a paper exploring all the possibilities of these fearsome black holes. They think there are no problems but are reluctant to talk about their findings until they have been peer reviewed, Dr. Mangano said.

Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, “Neither has any merit.” He pointed out that because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”

 

Incompetence

Pretty interesting - and pretty much accords with my experience:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/01/18/MN73840.DTL

 

Sweding Tron

Great piece of lo-tech amateur animation - homage

http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/03/trons-classic-l.html

Boomtown 2050

 

The Australian Bureau of Statistics projects that the current population of Perth, Western Australia (1,497,480 as at 2006) will double by 2050.  This not only means that 651,078 new homes will need to be built but also the entire infrastructure of the city will have to double.  What was built in 178 years will need to be reproduced in 43.  This is daunting, and yet no one is talking about it.  Everyone is too busy - the city is booming!

 

As part of an Australian Research Council Discovery grant regarding suburbia, ecology and design, Professor Richard Weller (Faculty of Architecture, Landscape & Visual Arts, University Of Western Australia) is heading a team that is developing various growth scenarios for the city so that the public can have a more informed debate about the future of Perth.  They state "We are not making utopias; we are projecting a range of options that are all relatively feasible."

 

More information can be obtained from the following link:

 

 http://www.alva.uwa.edu.au/boomtown

 

 

FIDIMPLICITARY

I had to send this other word with examples of impugnment in it:
http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-fid1.htm

FIDIMPLICITARY /ˌfɪdimˈplɪcitəry/

Putting one's faith in someone else's views.

It rather looks like the sort of word somebody has forged in a fit of misplaced inventiveness. It was created by Sir Thomas Urquhart in 1652 in a book with a Greek title I won't try to reproduce but which has the subtitle The Discovery of a Most Exquisite Jewel. He took it from the church Latin fides implicita, implicit faith.

He used it as a scathing epithet for academic types, gown-men, who were very happy to believe the assertions of their predecessors and were prepared to take all things literally on trust and without examination. So far as anybody knows, Sir Thomas was the only person who ever used it. It did appear in an issue of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1817, but in a caricature of Sir Thomas that had him refer to "those shallow and fidimplicitary coxcombs, who fill our too credulous ears with their quisquiliary deblaterations".

Those are a nice pair of knock-down words, as Humpty Dumpty might have said to Alice. Quisquiliary is Urquhart's variation on quisquilian, meaning worthless or trivial; deblateration comes from the Latin deblaterare, to prate or blab out.

These old-timers certainly knew how to insult people. We've largely lost the art of elaborate epithetical impugnment, relying more on crude invective these days. Polysyllabic scurrility should be our watchword!

Urban Planning Scott Adams Style

See: http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2008/02/ultimate-one-st.html

Someone asked about the ultimate city plan. I have that too, conceptually.

The biggest problem with any city is all the traffic. And much of that traffic can be avoided if the city is designed right. I imagine homes above ground, connected by a network of underground bike and robot paths.

The bike paths would allow weather-free, flat paths, and parking, from anywhere to anywhere in the city. No cars to contend with, and wide enough for senior citizens to putter around in their trikes while kids zip around in the fast lane.

The robots would be like larger versions of the Roomba vacuum cleaning robot, but designed to pick up and deliver merchandise and food from one place to another. Every home would have an elevator to the underground area where the robots would deliver goods and wait for you to unload.

Imagine ordering anything you want over the Internet, and your cell phone alerts you when the delivery robot is waiting beneath your house to be unloaded. It can wait all day, because there are plenty of robots to go around. The robots would have their own dedicated paths, separate from the bikes, and accessible only by service technicians.

Commuting would be unnecessary if your co-workers and most customers also lived in the city. Each home would be equipped with a home office (or two) that provides the ultimate telecommuter setup. Just insert your earpiece and have your avatars hold online virtual meetings. If you need to courier documents or prototypes, the underground robots do it in minutes.

Homes would be built in clusters around comprehensive health club facilities, like the one near me, www.ClubSports.com. It has everything from spa facilities to yoga to tennis to rock climbing to dancing. Membership would be included in city taxes, and would pay for itself in reduced healthcare.

When you needed to travel beyond your block, but within the city, taxis and public transit would do most of that job.

That’s the basic outline of the ultimate future city. It still needs work.

 

 

The professional urban planners amongst us might have a quiet chuckle to themselves, but it is an area that many people, from many walks of life (so to speak) are rather interested in - anything that they now perceive directly affects their amenity of life.

 

Remind me one day to post my extended ideas on urban planning (and comments on this post).

 

step over

longitudinal follow up date of several million people- happiness is U shaped- with the nadir at 50 - peaks at 17 and late 80s
it correlates inversely with self discovery, fundamental changes - and dreaming intensity -
and so -
we dream ...

Historical Social Networking

This whole Web2.0 social networking thing is quite interesting - I love getting invites from people on LinkedIn and on Facebook (the two main ones where invites come from). It has this interesting effect of not only connecting to people that you know now and people that you have known in the past, but also provides an element of an historical timeline for one's life, a sort of personal archeological dig. It is an important part of one's present and future to be informed of one's past - informed from a variety of aspects - facets which reflect different elements of one's psyche and behaviour.

Friendship

Old friends, we have sought out a place to meet,
Now we chat by the window until
The candles burn out.
Talking and laughing together,
Our faces are happy
And our hearts serene.
This friendship is as pure as water;
We jot down our poems
With strong brushwork.

- Monchu (1739-1829)

Music

Have I listened to anything that has changed my life? Where do I start? As in, so many things, I would never get through them all if I stayed writing this until midnight – a week from now!!

In no particular order, but ...

In 1973, I heard/bought an album called Cyborg by Klaus Schulze – absolutely mind-blowing. German electronic music. The original and the best. An early Schulze work - an amazing concept. Then followed his best albums – Mirage and Body Love (and then Body Love II). I still listen to these albums, transported into another universe (that old cliche - tried and true).

And everything, but everything, that David Bowie has ever done. Once again, I listen to his music all the time - on constant rotation on my MP3 player.

And Brian Eno – all his early stuff. "Before And After Science" is an absolute classic. And his work with Bowie was phenomenal.

Then there is Patti Smith – the rock-punk singer (not the now unknown disco artist). Patti is the greatest poet that is alive today – all set to the greatest music. The passion that she embeds and engenders in her music is uplifting (to say the least).

And J. S. Bach – everything he has done, but, particularly, for instance, the Christmas Oratorio (the most joyous life affirming music you could ever hear in your life) and his Violin Concertos (BWV 1041, 1042 and 1043). I recently heard Bach’s Easter Oratorio again, and the Aria for Mary Jacobi (Soprano) and Violin is the most sublime piece of music you could hear. The performance by the solo violin is gorgeous.

Damn, there are so many more. Loreena McKennit for instance. Her albums “The Mask & Mirror” and “The Book of Secrets” are so listenable, so deep and complex. One must listen to them again and again.

For your performance background music – listen to the Bach Violin Concertos. There are movements in there that have fabulous rhythm and great melodies.

And I recently downloaded a “album” called “100 Chansons Francaises de Legende Volume 5” – which, as the name implies is full of French Songs – original classics. I subscribe to www.emusic.com which gives me 90 songs to download each month for a small fee. There is some fabulous stuff on there. For instance, I recently got albums by a band called Calexico, out of Arizona – a combination of Latino and Indie music – very very good. I just love these little surprises I discover on there. In fact, I look forward to the anticipation of the new - of finding some wonderful band, a great new piece of music.

And then there is the music by Jacques Brel.

He is another that has been life-changing for me. I listen to “Jacques Brel Is Alive And Well And Living In Paris” all the time – it is also part of the main rotation on my MP3 player. He wrote some absolute classic pieces. Inventive and fantastical lyrics. Great tunes. The guy was a genius.

For the classical, some pieces by Debussy, such as “Preludes - Livre I - Les sons et les parfums tournrnt dans l'air du soir” is achingly beautiful.

Then there is Beethoven – that guy is a monster. Get anything by Beethoven.

Or Mendelssohn – his Scottish Symphony, or his Italian Symphony, are both fabulous. And "From The Hebrides" is wonderful - so memorable.

Don’t get me started on Wagner – a bit of an acquired taste, but once you are bitten – god help you. The final aria from Tristan und Isolde where Isolde sings of her love and dies is soul destroying and life affirming all at the same time.

In fact, all of this is barely encompassing the extent of the eclectic taste in music that I have cultivated over the years - a cultivation of joy, growing in appreciation and wonder at how glorious humanity is, what it is capable of in its most sublime expression.

"Try to reason about Love... and you will lose your reason" (French Proverb)

"Try to reason about Love... and you will lose your reason" (French Proverb)

The Scientists

Last night I went to see The Scientists with my nephew, at the Perth International Arts Festival. They are an original punk-indie band from the 1980’s in Perth that influenced the likes of Kurt Cobain from Nirvana etc.

I went with my nephew because nobody else would go with me – poor poor ol’ me – but he enjoyed going to a way-out indie event. The Scientists were average to start and the mixing was a bit awful but they got better as the night went along.

Sorry

An historic moment for Australian history. The Prime Minister apologising to the indigenous peoples of Australia, saying sorry for the injustices of the past. Apoligising for what happened, seeking reconciliation and moving to create a new future, a better future, all working together for the good of all in Australia. Extremely moving, very emotional. Much more so than ever expected. An important moment for the nation, and for the individual - for this individual, as it is for all other individuals.

Achievement and Satisfaction

Work has been funny. Not too difficult nor stressed nor pressurised.

But, at the same time, rather unsatisfying. Regardless of the actual progress made (I have actually setup a bunch of stuff and have put together some rather good ideas), it all seems like little bits and bobs. All disconnected pieces of work, which I flit from one to another. No extended attention span. Which may or may not be my problem, as opposed to the work (except for the fact that it is indeed related to the work - that is the element of how activity affects psychology quite inextricably).

Not like working on a project, on an assignment, where there is something serious to be done, and where I have to really focus and apply to get it done. On something that is both important and interesting at the same time (not something that may be important to somebody else – or so they think, or the rules say so – but is utterly deadly boring – of which there is so much involved in the work environment).

Not that I necessarily want to get overloaded and pressurised with doing some stuff, but I do think that I really need a full-on project to work on for a period of time, that I can really dedicate myself to. It then feels like something is achieved, that I am doing something worthwhile.

It can be virtually anything, and it certainly can be something that I have created for myself. But it needs to be fairly dedicated, almost full-time work. I think one of the problems here is that I don’t have the luxury of dedicating myself solely to something that I really want to do (because there is this other work that is necessary – earnings wise) and so I end up flitting from one thing to another (simply because there is absolutely so much that needs to be done, personally and professionally) and not really being satisfied with any of the things done.

Not all the time, mind you, since some of the activities actually produce or result in something good and worthwhile, and progress towards the ultimate goal (if there is such a thing – wouldn’t it be nice to know it), and some days (many days) I feel good about the situation – but, other days, honestly, it is rather disheartening and stultifying. One just, then, feels like doing nothing. And maybe that is probably a reasonable solution, in some instances for some circumstances – stop the headlong rush and breathe quietly for a minute – then resume.

Books Books Books

Sometimes it is wonderful to unexpectedly stumble upon (internet pun intended) someone writing about something that you feel, something that you occasionally talk about, but never verbalised in such a precise manner, something which completely sums up an attitude and an obsession (if one can go that far in calling such behaviour this). In this vein, I reference the following ... http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003024.php

« TRANSLATIONS ON THE MARKET. | Main

February 07, 2008

A QUOTE ON BIBLIOMANIA.

In cleaning off my desk just now I found a quote I'd copied down back in 2002, which went as follows:

Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity… we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance.

It seemed to be attributed to the bibliophile A. E. Newton (1863-1940), but I thought I'd better google it to be sure. What I found was confusion.

In the first place, many sources had, after the word "acquired," the phrase "(by passionate devotion to them)"—with or without parentheses—which certainly reads better. But to find what the correct form was, an accurate citation was needed, and there was none to be had. Eventually I turned up page 78 of Newton's A Magnificent Farce: And Other Diversions of a Book-collector (1921), which has: "...it is my pleasure to buy more books than I can read. Who was it who said, 'I hold the buying of more books than one can peradventure read, as nothing less than the soul's reaching towards infinity; which is the only thing that raises us above the beasts that perish'? Whoever it was, I agree with him..." So there we have a portion of the original quote (in slightly different form), but attributed to the mysterious "Who was it." This could, of course, be a coy way of quoting oneself. But what about the rest?

Next the quest brought me to The Anatomy of Bibliomania by Holbrook Jackson (1874-1948), which seems to be a collection of quotes on the pleasures of books and book-collecting, italicized and footnoted (good man!), stitched together with Jackson's own commentary in roman type. On page 183 (continuing onto page 184) we find:

Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired by passionate devotion to them produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can peradventure read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity, and that this passion is the only thing that raises us above the beasts that perish,¹ an argument which some have used in defence of the giddy raptures invoked by wine.

The footnote refers us to "A.E. Newton, A Magnificent Farce, 78," which we have already visited. So far, so good; the italicized bits are from Newton, the rest is from Jackson, and the whole thing at some point got attributed to the former.

But what about the last part, "we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance"? The internet holds hundreds of instances of it, always attached to the previous quote by ellipses, but Google Books can't find it at all. Is it from some work of Newton's not yet digitized? Was it tacked on by some anonymous compiler of Meaningful Quotations who thought it would suit the context? Alas, it is not in The Yale Book of Quotations, nor The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, nor Bartlett's, so I can only speculate, and ponder for the thousandth time the difficulty of pinning down "famous quotations."

Posted by languagehat at February 7, 2008 01:05 PM

On Climbing the Highest Peak of Stone Gate

On Climbing the Highest Peak of Stone Gate

At dawn with staff in hand I climbed the crags,
At dusk I made my camp among the mountains.
Only a few peaks rise as high as this house,
Facing the crags, it overlooks winding streams.
In front of its gates a vast forest stretches.
While boulders are heaped round its very steps.
Hemmed in by mountains, there seems no way out,
The track gets lost among the thick bamboos.
Deep in meditation, how can I part from Truth?
I cherish the Way and never will swerve from it

-- Xie Lingyun (385–433)

Wiki and Clouds

Got a new wiki going (Dokuwiki), which will be experimented with for requirements gathering and management.

Also got the whole Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Solution (S3) exercise going – the ability to run your own computers without having any hardware at all – Amazon provides it all. A way of having your server solutions without the hassles of managing all that hardware etc.

But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flaw,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long-since cancelled woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.

-- Wm. Shakespeare

When dreams do show thee me

All days are nights to see till I see thee,
And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.

-- William Shakespeare, Sonnets