So the other night I dreamed that I was hanging out with all these
hippies or New Age types or something at the edge of a lake, and
it was getting toward dusk, and we were all like shouting out
slogans or clever sayings or something, and I said "Language
Cannot Express Truth!" (as I often say in real life), and this
made quite an impression on at least a few of the group and there
was some laughter or amazement or indignation or something, and
one androgynous person came over and said roughly that she (I
have a vaguely female memory of her, although as I said she was
mostly androgynous) was (roughly) really glad to hear me say that,
because it meant she wasn't the only one, and just exactly what
did I mean by it?
And I said that well consider what langauge is: it's just some
marks on paper, or it's just vibrations of the air passing over
my vocal chords that makes your eardrums vibrate in a certain way
or whatever, whereas consider what real reality is -- and just
as I was saying this the sun rather suddenly started to set and
there was this spectacular sunset over the lake and everyone
started to sort of crowd down to the shore to look at it instead
of listening to what I was saying.
Which (and I don't know if I thought this in the dream or
only afterwards) seems entirely appropriate.
And then last night I dreamed that I was sitting in a full
lotus (which is something I can't do very well or for very
long in real life) on the surface of a lake (which is also
something I can't do very well or for very long in real life),
and I put out my hands to see why I wasn't sinking into the
water, and it turned out that the surface of the water was
sort of hard.
I felt around more, and found that I was actually sitting on
a floating disc of ice.
It was obvious to me that the ice had formed under me because
of something about the way I was sitting or my attitude of mind
or something, and I wondered (roughly) if everyone who did zazen
on the surface of a lake got a similar ice disc.
There were other people around, some sitting on the dock and
some maybe also sitting on the water (might have been the same
lake and the same people as the night before, no telling) and
I noticed that next to one of the people sitting on the dock
there was this circular piece of ice slowly melting away.
"You too?" I asked, and he said, sort of shrugging,
"Oh. Yeah."
A reader writes:
"Europa riding a bill" ? Which bill ?
Oh. Yeah.
*8)
I took a bunch of coins with me to the grocery yesterday (in an
empty cardboard can of mocha hot chocolate mix or something) to
put into the coins machine (about twenty bucks, minus nine percent,
donated to The American Red Cross).
The coins machine rejects things that it doesn't recognize as coins,
and various of these rejects left behind by previous users
were sitting there on the ledge under
the buttons, and while the machine was counting my coins I looked
through them and was amazed.
Among the pennies apparently stuck together with superglue and the
quarter that had been through a metal press or something and wasn't
really particularly round anymore and stuff, I found:
- A 1995 Canadian dime, small and shiny silver,
- a 2002 Trinadad and Tobago penny, small and shiny copper,
- a 1993 Jamaican dollar, thick dark heavy metal,
- a 2002 Greek 2 euro coin,
way cool; bimetallic like a Loonie, with
Europa riding a bill on the back.
Those are the ones I took home with me.
(Can't imagine why they got left behind; the Greek one
is worth almost two fifty US.
Maybe the former owner thought it was play money or something.
Or just has different standards than I do.)
There was also a squished penny from one of those penny squishing
souvenir machines, from the
Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum
& Planetarium, which was pretty cool also, but
I decided to leave it behind in case at that moment someone
was thinking "oh my gosh, I must have left that souvenir from the
Rosicrucian Museum at the coins machine in the grocery!", and
would be coming back hoping it was still there.
Next time I go to the grocery, I have to remember to check that
ledge again.
A reader writes:
This is not particularly about the feet.
I just loved your ballet practice practice piece.
(See last Tuesday.)
Normally when people say offtopic things in the comment box
we send some of the boys around, but we'll make an exception
in this case.
Thanks very!
Evidence that people actually enjoy these words is
always most gratifying.
Was that a Mia sighting on Saturday?
The woman looking at the branches?
I think we can assume that was Mia, lacking any
evidence to the contrary.
Another
Assistant Professor of Mathematics writes:
Huh! I wonder how many of us Assistant Professors of Mathematics
there are among faithful ceoln-readers? 'Cause I'm pretty sure that
other one isn't me.
So if some reader can send us the fraction of people in the world
who are assistant professors of mathematics, we can then use
mathematics (how appropriate!) to determine a Scientifically Valid
lower bound on the number of readers we have.
Isn't Nature Wonderful!
Trying to find the elevators from an unfamiliar hallway in
the Lab today, I was reminded of a comic book I had years
and years ago, whose name I've entirely forgotten, but which
had in it a story, in black-and-white cartooning, about a
couple that goes exploring through a door
into a cave somewhere, and gets lost,
and when they're just losing hope of ever regaining the
surface they come to a door again and think they are
saved, but when they open it it turns out that the door
leads into Hell.
For whatever reason the story (lame as it sounds in narration)
impressed me deeply, with that sort of crawly semi-erotic horror
that some stories have, that makes you come back and think about
them shudderingly again and again, officially unpleasant as they
are.
Fortunately today I found the elevators before encountering
any doors into Hell.
The binary "enclosure" in the RSS feed for today's entry
(which podcasting clients in their naive innocence will
assume is a Podcast even though nothing in the actual XML
says anything about that) is the very first issue of
Lesbian Soup,
because Suzy Bright said nice things about it on the issue
of In Bed that I listened to at the club this morning, and
because it's fun to exploit the Podcasting protocols by
including random enclosures in one's syndication feeds.
(Also because all the sounds on the
site about
chinchilla sounds are in WAV format, and binary enclosures
in WAV format tend not to work in some clients, and the stuff
that I have to convert WAV to mp3 is on another computer.
Maybe we'll do chinchilla sounds later on.)
I'd forgotten all about my podcasting!
Tsk and tsk!
So today's entry will once more have an
associated audio track
as an "enclosure" in the rss feeds,
because Podcasts Are Cool.
(I was thinking I could just keep reusing
an old one, since it doesn't
really matter what's in one's podcast, but I got
more ambitious today.
Maybe later I'll be lazier.
Or forget about it entirely again.)
So, as my podcast listeners may have guessed, I've been
watching Babylon 5 DVDs again.
I just finished Episode 6 of Season 4, the one where
(big spoiler warning would be necessary here if anyone but me
hadn't already seen this back last century) the younger
races win the Shadow War, and it feels like the story is
over.
Pretty tempting to take a rest for a year or two, pretending
that the series really did have a nice happy
ending here, and not get all embroiled in
whatever's going to happen in the season and a half that's
still to come.
But I'm curious enough (and there are all those loose ends
not tied up yet) that I'll probably charge right ahead.
Still, it reminds me that (or of the thought that) those moments,
days, times of quiet (or noisy) calm (or otherwise) happiness and
peace are what (or maybe what) makes it all okay, and makes all
the struggle worthwhile.
As long as they had that one victory party there that one time,
and everyone was happy, it's okay that more stuff happens
afterward.
Because after all more stuff always happens afterward.
Oooh, I'm so profound!
Two "laugh to keep from crying" items
from Heather:
a
Windows firewall, and
a
presidential adventure game
("There is a small number of insurgents here").
"Oovil
snetch," he growled in his mind.
Some more
interesting
technical detail on the WMF vulnerability and why it was there.
"Buyer
makes the decision to purchase the Property independent of
any representation of the Agents or Brokers involved in the transaction
regarding digestive systems of the badger."
I think the funniest thing about
the joke
is that it's not really a "blonde joke" at all.
In almost but not quite the same spirit as our
Broken Koans, some very
funny koan
parodies (more or less).
On our vague memory of The Day The Earth Stood Still, a
reader who is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics (yay, mathematics!)
writes:
In the original story that the movie was based on,
the robot was the master. See
[link],
the sixteenth bulleted item.
So there we are; I probably read that story once, somewhere.
Or something.
And finally, a spammer sends us this unusually gripping
tale of intrigue and betrayal:
Subject: ASDOK INVESTMENT LIMITED
DEAR SIR,
I AM DAN EZE THE FINANCIAL CONTROLLER OF ASDOK INVESTMENT LIMITED AN OIL
SERVICING OUTFIT BASED IN PORT HARCOURT, RIVERS STATE, THE SOUTH- SOUTH OF
NIGERIA AND ONE OF THE LARGEST OIL PRODUCING STATE.
THERE IS A CLASH GOING ON BETWEEEN THE GOVERNMENT AND THE INDIGENES OF THE
STATE KNOWN AS THE NIGER DELTA PEOPLE'S VOLUNTEER FORCE IN WHICH THE
CHAIRMAN AND CEO OF ASDOK INVESTMENT IS THE LEADER AND CHAIRMAN OF THE
GROUP. THOUGH MY CHAIRMAN IS INTO A STRONG OIL DEAL {BUNKERING} IN THE STATE
AND BEEN SO RICH AND INFLUENTIAL, SPONSORED HIS GROUP AGAINST GOVERNMENT AND
FOREIGN INVESTORS OVER THE NON-DEVELOPMENT SAGA IN THE STATE WHICH WARRANTED
THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT TO ARREST HIM EARLY THIS WEEK.
IN A RELATED DEVELOPMENT, THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HAS PLANNED TO CONFISCATE
HIS PROPERTIES IN OTHER TO SILENCE HIM FROM FUTHER DISTURBANCES TO THEIR
FOREIGN INVESTORS AND CITIZENS OF THE STATE. DUE TO WHAT IS GOING ON AND FOR
THE PROTECTION OF HIS INVESTMENTS AND PROPERTIES IN THE COUNTRY, I REQUEST
FOR A DEAL WITH YOU OR YOUR COMPANY/INVESTMENT AS IN TRANSFERING ALL HIS
BUSINESS ENTITIES TO BE UNDER YOUR CARE FOR THE MAIN TIME. THESE COMPRISES
OF CASH WORTH OF $45M AND SOME RELEVANT DOCUMENTS.
PLEAE IF YOU ARE NOT CAPABLE TO HANDLE THIS DEAL DON'T REPLY.
YOURS FAITHFULLY,
DAN EZE
Could be a paperback thriller, eh?
Maybe that's where they got the idea, in fact.
Still, you have to give them some credit for trying
to be original.
On the way back from dropping off the little daughter at dance
today, an ambulance came out of the firehouse with its siren
going, and I stuck the nose of my car out of the way over
in the lane of stopped traffic next to me to give it more room.
I remember 'way back in my youth when I'd just recently gotten my
full driver's license, I was at an intersection somewhere and
the car ahead of me annoyingly came to a dead stop, even though
the light was green and everything (I heard the sirens, but I
didn't think anything of them; in my recently-exited childhood
sirens had always been entirely about someone else, after all).
I swerved around the stopped car and into the intersection,
and fortunately noticed the oncoming fire truck in time to
swerve again into an adjoining parking lot.
It probably wasn't as close and scary as I remember it, but still.
Ever since I've been very good at getting out of the way
quickly and completely for emergency vehicles
(and I have no tolerance for people who aren't so good
about it).
Steve who used to have a weblog
directs our attention to
a
notable New Scientist article.
In this article (the complete online copy costs money; I read the hardcopy
from the library at the lab), Stephen Wolfram works on dispelling
rumors that he might not be an utter nutball, by saying that there's
no need to try to contact aliens, since we can just simulate them
in our computers or (more efficiently) just simulate whatever
interesting stuff they might have told us if we'd managed to
contact them.
After all, he says, the only interesting thing an alien could
say to us would be "here are some interesting computations that
I've done", and we can save ourselves a whole lot of trouble by
just doing those computations, and cutting out the alien middleman.
This is nutballish in a whole lot of ways, of course.
It's like saying that no one needs to bother writing novels,
because we can just generate random strings of characters, and
eventually (albeit in a period of time vastly longer than the
age of the universe) any novel we might want will just pop out!
The claim that the only interesting thing an alien might tell
us is some neat cellular automaton rule he found the other day
is similarly bizarre (although entirely understandable given
what Wolfram's been doing locked in his room for the last
few decades).
The whole thing is like saying that we don't need to build real starships,
we can just play Alpha Centauri.
Or that we don't need to have actual families, we can just
play The Sims 2.
In completely unrelated news,
Hermes and Camryn are in love,
and Martin and Jane are engaged,
and after Martin and Allegra graduated Camryn moved into the Bright
house with Hermes; not long after that
Zachary Langerak moved in to
the spare room, and after he fell back in love with his teenage
sweetie Sophie Miguel she moved in also (so far they're sleeping
in separate beds).
And on arriving back in the neighborhood Allegra
took a room at Brandi's
boarding house, where she's fixed up her room all cool
and semi-goth.
What do you think?
(I think that's all good.)
I think if I lived in Australia, I'd buy Carlton Draught!
[link]
potatos? Thinkmatos!
The branches were scattered like jackstraws, there on the ledge,
and blooming, too early, she thought, to survive the painful winter.
That's just the way things are these days.
mostly colorless green ones, when I'm sleeping furiously
Chomsky reference! Everyone take a drink!
(Of, say, Carlton Draught?)
Do you really put years in a row? Where? In the yard?
Beside the Big Tub of Water? Or maybe underneath it?
Are you reeling in the years?
Are you stowing away the time?
Are you gathering up the tears?
Have you had enough Carlton Draught?
Only progress can satisfy hunger
I think you make my head hurt.
I think your blog, where the blog has a particular color and
font and format and even theme, and the web around it has a
particular topology and protocol and bandwidth, and the traffic
falls a certain way on them, and they were made with the sweat
and attention and love of certain geeks, that your blog taken
that way is the biggest obstacle to your own progress.
more digital prayerwheels:
[link]
and [link]
Just what we need, more digital prayerwheels!
And progress.
Can it really satisfy hunger?
Certainly in the most literal sense.
And that's the one we ought to do first, seems like.
Is the weblog taken that way the biggest obstacle to my own progress?
At the moment I don't think there are any obstacles, or any
progress.
Or even any weblog.
(And there is no spoon.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grilled_Cheese_Aspiration
Whodunit? Hot Kay.
We still haven't installed the Nightlife expansion (even though we
got it for Christmas), so I haven't had the chance to experience the
joys or otherwise of the Grilled Cheese Aspiration.
But it's good to know that it's not missing from Wikipedia.
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28151
Indeed;
A sobering thought to end a log entry.
Be good!
