Life is Good (I Guess)

Well, I was stumped trying to think of a good post to end the year with, and then Donna over at Refusing to Age Gracefully passed along this Life is Good Award:

What sort of unholiness has she signed me up for? Well, I guess I'm now under a contractual obligation under threat of death and dismemberment to:

1. First thank, and link back to the person who gave you the award.  (I'm sure my undying gratitude comes through clearly in the above sentiments.)

2. Answer the 10 survey questions.

3. Pass the award on to other bloggers that you hope to alienate.

4. Contact the bloggers you have chosen and tell them they're dying, and then say, "Just kidding...how do feel about answering questions?"

So, on to the questions:

1.  If you blog anonymously, are you happy doing this?  If you aren't anonymous, do you wish you started out anonymously, so that you could be anonymous now?

I actually do write another blog anonymously, it's called "How I'm Going to Kill My Neighbor in His Sleep."  It's details my plan to jimmy open the lock, creep quietly up the...oh, whoops!  Damn survey!  I hope my neighbor isn't reading this.

2. Describe an Incident that Shows Your Stubborn Side.

No.

3. What do you see when you really look at yourself in the mirror?

I see a parallel universe that's exactly like ours but everything's backwards.  There's this bald guy that lives there and he keeps staring at me every time I'm in the bathroom.  What a creep.  

4. What's your favorite summer cold drink?

I like to relax on the deck of my million dollar yacht with an ice cold margarita while my three diamond studded flying ponies put on a live theater production of Forest Gump in the sky above me.   

5. When you take time for yourself, what do you do?

Oh, I just buy duct tape and rope and write on my anonymous blog.  You know, the usual stuff.

6. Is there something you still want to accomplish in Life?

I'd like to beat the Guinness Book's record for the largest beard of bees.

 

7. When you attended school were you the class clown, the class overachiever, the shy person, or always ditching?

I remember this one time we put Drano in the teacher's coffee.  Oh, we laughed and laughed.  His wife was a little upset at the funeral, but I'm sure she sees the humor in it now.  Those were good times.

8. If you close your eyes and visualize a poignant moment in your life, what do you see?

The only thing I ever see when I close my eyes is a clown cutting off the tip of his tongue with a razor blade while tiny demons dance around him laughing in the flames.  The only way I can find peace is to kill again.  I wonder if my neighbor's home yet.

9. Is it easy for you to share your true self in your blog, or are you more comfortable writing about other people and events?

I'm bearing my soul here.  What do you want from me, survey?  I give and I give, and it's never good enough for you!  I hate you, survey!  You've ruined my life!

10. If you had a choice to sit down and read a book or talk on the phone, which would you do and why?

You know, it's funny you should ask.  I used to face this very choice every day, and it always left me paralyzed with indecision.  Then I heard about 1-800-Mmm-Book.  You call them up, and they read a book to you over the phone.  They've got Wuthering Heights, David Copperfield, all of the classics.  They're all read by this lady with a really breathy voice.  $9.99 a minute. 

So, there you go.  I should mention that I have a medical condition that renders me incapable of answering survey questions seriously.

I would like to pass this award on to:

I guess I'd like to inflict this on Scott @ Atypical Read.  Don't make me come looking for you.

Anyway, Happy New Year everybody.

See you on the other side.   

Trying to Understand Relativity (part 6)

This relativity business is pretty confusing.  I've been thinking that my thought experiment might be a little easier to follow if I made it a little less abstract.  With that in mind, I think that I should give the people in house A and house B actual names and identities.  We'll call the guy in house B "Bob", and we'll call the person in house A "Ann".  Yep, the person in house A was a woman the whole time!  Bam! That's what they call a plot twist.  Bet you didn't see that coming.  You see, Ann had just called Bob to tell him that she was lonely and wanted him badly.  That's why he was pushing the light barrier to get over to her house.  It all makes sense now.

Please.  No comments about the Freudian symbolism in this picture.

So anyhow, when we last left these two, I had just made a nice break in the case.  I had said that if Bob made the trip between the two houses at a speed which allowed him to cross the light-year between them in a year and one day, then it would appear to Ann that he was making the trip in one day, unless you accounted for the constant velocity of light.  By taking that into account, time itself would have to expand.  I speculated that the trip would have to take 365 years from Ann's perspective to keep her view of the image of Bob's ship from exceeding the speed of light.  (If this sentence sounds like gibberish to anyone new here, please refer to the Relativity tab above.  It'll probably still sound like gibberish after that, but you'll have the satisfaction of reading 5 other pages of gibberish.)       

I want to try something to test the math here.  It's not that I absolutely need to know the math.  I'm not going for a PhD in relativistic physics.  I'm just trying to grasp the basic concept.  But if I can check my idea against the percentage of distortion that relativity actually predicts, then I'll know if I'm on the right track.  

Okay, let's say we slowed Bob down to a speed where he was crossing a light year in a year and 6 months.  That would put him at about 75% of the speed of light.  Without taking the constancy of light into account, the trip would appear to Ann to take 6 months.  This means that she would have to see the ship coming towards her at twice the speed of light.  Now then, going by what I said last time, in order for her vision of the ship not to exceed the speed of light then the trip would have to take 2 years from her perspective.   That makes the trip 1 year and six months for Bob, and two years for Ann, and the ratio of distortion would be  approximately 1:1.3 at 75% the speed of light.

So this is basically what I'm doing here: I'm considering how many times faster than the speed of light Ann would have to see Bob's ship going for her to witness the trip without any time distortion.  Then I'm multiplying that number by a year, because there's one light year of distance, so light at it's constant speed should take a year to cross that distance.  Then I'm comparing that result to the time it actually takes Bob to make the trip.  In that manner, I'm coming up with a ratio between time for Bob and time for Ann that expresses the distortion mathematically.  Again, in this case 1:1.3 at 75% the speed of light.

At this point, I feel like I've thrown this whole thing together with duct tape.  It can't be right, can it?  Well, check out this handy little chart showing the distortion courtesy of Zayini at wikimedia commons:

I was forced to attribute this picture at gunpoint.  Sorry.

The numbers running up the left of the graph show the ratio of distortion, while the numbers running along the bottom show the percentage of the speed of light.  You can see that between 70 and 80% the curve hits at around the 1.5 mark.   So I'm a little off.  My formula is predicting that Bob's 18 month journey will take 24 months from Ann's point of view, but the chart is suggesting that the journey would take 27 months from Ann's perspective.   I'm off by three months.  That might not seem like much, but it definitely shows that my formula is wrong.  

Last time I think I got a clear glimpse of the time distortion.  I can at least see not how it's possible.  Progress is being made.  But I've still got some work to do, figuring the finer details of how it works.  The thing to focus on now is how Bob's 18 month journey at 75% of the speed of light can come out to be 27 months for Ann.  This handy chart is telling me the result I'm supposed to get.  I just have to come up with an understanding which produces this result.  Should be pretty simple, right?   

Thoughts?  Anyone?             

A Demonstration of Consciousness

In yesterday's post I compared our conscious faculties of perception to a flashlight.  I said that the beam represented the focus of our attention.  Well, the following video provides a nice demonstration of how that beam works by asking you to perform a simple task that is surprisingly difficult.  So, pay close attention, follow the instructions, and enjoy.

Now, let's suppose that you had decided to stop watching video at around the 0:44 second mark and you just said, "Forget it.  Forget Bryan and his stupid blog, and his stupid video.  Screw him and the horse he rode in on.", and you just walked away and never watched the rest of the video.  I'll give you one hint what you would have dreaming about tonight.

Predictive Dreaming

The other day I wrote a post about a shared dream experience I had when I was a kid.  In the comments for the post, the subject came up of another familiar yet mysterious type of dream, dreams of future events.  As I pointed out then, I've had a few minor brushes with this.  I've never had a dream which directly featured an event exactly as it was going to happen, but I have had a few times where a dream was oddly related to a subsequent event in a way that seems to go beyond simple coincidence.  Once I dreamt that I was trying to fix a gas fireplace in my bedroom, only to wake up and discover the next day that my gas furnace wasn't working.  Another time I dreamt that I was in a crumbling, abandoned house trying to retrieve one of my cats that had fallen through a hole in the floor, only the wake up and discover that this same cat had run away again (don't worry; he came back.)  I had a few other instances as well that don't come to mind at the moment.

Now, I think I might have a possible, and I stress the word possible, explanation for this.  If I can't explain how two people can share a dream, an imaginary event supposedly taking place solely in one of the dreamer's minds, then I can hardly hope to reach any solid conclusions regarding predictive dreaming.  However, I tend to be of the opinion that things have reasonable, scientific explanations, elusive though those explanations may sometimes be.  Just because I lack a reasonable explanation for shared dreaming, doesn't mean I'm completely ready to throw in the towel of logic and embrace the world of black magic and wizardly incantations quite yet.

To begin with, we need to visualize the conscious mind's relation to the sub-conscious mind.   First, imagine your memory is a cramped room crammed full of filing cabinets.  The cabinets are stuffed to over flowing with files.  They're spilling out of the drawers onto the floor.  They're piled up onto of the cabinets for lack of space, wedged in tight against the ceiling.  It's a complete pandemonium.  In the middle of the room is the little desk of the over-worked filing clerk.  He's surrounded by mountains of files on all sides.  They tower over him and barely provide room for him to fit in his own filing room.  This clerk is your conscious mind.  Although he is surrounded by these towering archives, he only has room on his little desk for three or four files at a time.  If he wants to look at a different file, he has to put one of the ones on his desk back and retrieve another.  His access to the files is limited to the finite space he has to work with.  The subconscious mind has no such limitations.  It has access to the entire archive at all times.  You might say it's the room and the cabinets themselves.  Except, in this case the files are no mere pieces of paper.  They are a living, breathing thing, organizing and cross-referencing themselves behind the clerk's back.  

Now, that's inside the mind.  When it comes to looking out and perceiving the world and processing new sensory data coming in, the subconscious again has the advantage.  Imagine you're out in the dark at night and you have a flashlight with you.  Your field of vision is limited to what can be illuminated in the narrow beam of the flashlight.  It's useful to light your way, but it hardly provides you with a complete picture of the world around you.  This flashlight is once again our friend the conscious mind.  We carry this flashlight with us constantly, even on the brightest, sunniest day.  It is the focus of our attention.  Like the desk of our file clerk, this focus is extremely limited, and the more intense the focus, the more limited it's range.  Returning to our flashlight analogy, notice how the beam intensifies and yet narrows at the same time as we approach an object.  This how our attention works.  

Our subconscious, on the other hand, is like a cat with night vision.  It sees everything, all the time.  Even the most insignificant piece of sensory information that crosses our path gets received, processed, and filed.  This leads us right back to our filing clerk.  Every minute of every day, new files arrive in the filing room.  Most of it comes from beyond the beam of our flashlight, so it wasn't noticed on the way in.  And the filing clerk, he's far too busy to sort through all this junk, so it just ends up getting stuffed into a cabinet.  That's when that behind the scenes, organic process of cross-referencing and automatic filing sets in without the clerk's knowledge.  

An interesting thing happens when we dream.  It's like the filing clerk has fallen asleep, dozing at his desk with his grey nose hairs fluttering as he snores, and we have an open run at the files.  We have a broader, more liberal access, but it's also a very haphazard and unstructured access because we don't have the clerk to sort through it all for us.  We just start tossing out files left and right, without rhyme or reason.  We put two files together because they both happen to be in red folders, or they both have pizza stains on them, or they both have three Q's on the first page.  In short, we make a complete mess.  In making this mess though, we're liable to stumble across connections that the file clerk might never have noticed.

An experiment was conducted once upon a time, where the subjects were shown composite pictures that featured dozens of different random elements.  They were shown these pictures very briefly, then they were asked to write down what elements they remembered from the pictures.  Then, after they had slept that night, they were asked to write down their dreams.  In almost all cases, their dreams featured elements from the composite picture that they had not written down.  In other words, they dreamt of elements that escaped the beam of the flashlight and the attention of the file clerk, but the information had been processed and stored nevertheless.  

This is where predictive dreaming comes in.  I think, perhaps, that somewhere in this incalculable pile of processed information lies clues to forth-coming events that the conscious mind has failed to pick up on.  If a dream forewarns of this event, and then it happens, the result seems miraculous.  But the only thing miraculous happening here is the conscious mind's failure to pay attention.  Consider this, let's say that you notice, consciously notice, that your hot water heater is leaking a tiny amount of water from it.  You take this as a sign of the water heater's impending failure, and when the tank finally does give out, you're hardly impressed by your psychic prognostication.  Simple logic warned you.  But what if you didn't consciously notice the leak?  You were in the basement.  The leak was in your field of vision, but the beam of your flashlight never honed in on it.  The information still gets processed, and as the experiment above shows, it's even more likely to show up in a dream precisely because it wasn't consciously noticed.  The results could certainly leave anyone mystified and thinking that they had had a genuine premonition.

This is not to say that your subconscious mind is a secret Maytag repairman, diagnosing bad furnaces and worn-out water heaters.  In the case of my furnace dream, it would have been enough for my subconscious to pick up on the fact that something was subtly off or different in the operation of the appliance.  In the case of my cat, he probably slipped out the door without my consciously taking note of it, but I did see him briefly zip by.  He is pretty damn fast, after all.  A fleeting look on a friend's face that should have warned you they weren't quite telling you the truth if you had noticed it, a neighbor's door standing open when it should have been closed passing through your peripheral field of vision as you drive by, a subtle and imperceptible difference in the amount of pressure you need to apply to your brakes, these are the things that premonitions are made of.  Your subconscious might not know what to make of these things.  In fact, your subconscious doesn't make anything out of anything at all.  That kind of deduction is a job for your conscious mind.  Your subconscious just tags, processes, and stores the information.  It does conduct the organic cross-referencing process I mentioned, but it's up to the dreaming mind to stumble across these loose connections.

So that's my two cents on the subject, at least.  As I started out by saying, my own experience with predictive dreaming is limited to dreams of startling coincidence and association.  Maybe my idea breaks down when considering dreams where someone actually sees and experience the event exactly as it's going to happen.  I don't know.  This is just one humble blogger's attempt to tackle the problem.  My resources are limited, and my references are sketchy.  I know I can sleep soundly on my explanation.  Good night.  Sweet dreams.                            

The Not-So-True History of Superstitions

I was thinking about superstitions yesterday, and how nonsensical and random they seem.  I figured that they must all have origin stories behind them.  Someone just doesn't wake up one morning and decide that opening umbrellas in the house is bad luck.  There has to be a historical event that set the precedent for these things.  One bad umbrella experience, and everyone from then on is forewarned that it's a bad idea.  So I thought it might be interesting, and might provide material for a post, if I looked up some of these stories.  Unfortunately, I found that most of these stories are actually pretty dull.  So I decided the hell with it; I would just make up some stories of my own.  I'm not sure what the point is, and anyone looking for actual information and enlightenment, should probably look somewhere else.    

 

                                                               WALKING UNDER A LADDER

In 1935 a shopkeeper named Henry Ferguson was on a ladder working on repairing a broken letter in his shop's sign.  As he was pounding in a nail, his hammer slipped and he smashed his thumb with it.  Preoccupied with the sudden pain, he dropped the hammer.  At that exact moment, Walter Montgomery, the manager of the local bank, was passing under the ladder.  Walter was late for an appointment, and he was in too much of a hurry to navigate around the ladder.  Just as he was checking his watch, the falling hammer hit him in the head.  He collapsed against the brick wall of the shop.  Seeing what had happened, Henry quickly climbed down from the ladder.  He stood panicking over the crumpled bank manager.  He was sure he had killed the man.  He looked about nervously.  It was early morning, and the street was deserted at that hour.  He had to act quickly.  He hoisted Mr. Montgomery's body up, and dragged it into the back of his shop.  He then locked up, and flipped the "open" sign to "closed".  He loaded Mr. Montgomery's body into the trunk of his car and drove far out into the countryside of a neighboring town, where he dropped the body deep in the woods.

As it turns out, Walter Montgomery had only been knocked out by the hammer, not killed.  Henry had just been in too much of a panic to confirm the man's vitality.  Walter regained consciousness hours later, long after it had grown dark out.  The nuzzling of a large grizzly bear brought him around.  His groggy eyes fluttered, but when he became aware of the bear standing over him, he shot up, wide awake.  Naturally this startled the bear, who began to viciously attack Mr. Montgomery.  It's a genuine miracle that he was able to escape with his life, but also a fairly fruitless one, as he died a few hours later.  He was spotted by a local farmer crawling out of the woods and taken to a nearby hospital.  In his dying delirium, he kept rambling on about how he had walked under a ladder and he had been transported across time and space to another dark land of ravaging monsters.  Although these were the lunatic ravings of a dying man, the legend grew from there.  The space beneath ladders came to  be considered inter-dimensional portals to unthinkable fates, and people avoided them with dread.     

                                                     
                                                      A BLACK CAT CROSSING YOUR PATH

Martha Price loved her black cat Midnight.  She was an elderly spinster and the cat was the sole companion of her twilight years.  One night she needed to fetch a jar of tomatoes from her cellar to prepare her dinner.  Pulling the chain for the light at the top of the stairs, she was dismayed to discover that the bulb had burned out.  She was forced to navigate the stairs in the dark.  Unfortunately, Midnight had made himself quite comfortable on the cellar stairs, three steps down from the landing.  Not being able to see the dark cat in the darkness of the cellar Miss Price's foot caught on the cat's flank and she tripped and tumbled down the remaining stairs.  She broke her neck and she lay dead on the cellar floor.  Midnight, momentarily perturbed by Miss Price tripping over him, simply settled back into a comfortable position and retained his post on the third step of the cellar stairs.

Three days later, Miss Price's neighbor Hiram Muller grew concerned that he hadn't seen the old woman leave her house at all, and he came by to check on her.  He searched the house, calling her name, but of course, no one answered.  Passing through the kitchen, he heard a soft meowing coming from behind the cellar door.  He opened the door and called for out for Miss Price into the darkness.  He tried the light chain, and he too found the bulb burned out.  He crept cautiously down the stairs, but his foot also caught on Midnight, who was still perched on the third step, evidently his favorite spot.  Hiram lay dead beside Miss Price with his neck broken as well.

In the end six bodies with broken necks lay in a heap at the bottom of Miss Price's cellar stairs before the feline impediment was finally removed.  Midnight let out an irritated meow at being disturbed from his spot, but he was soon pacified with a warm saucer of milk. and a can of tuna fish  From that day forward it was considered bad luck to have a black cat cross your path, especially on a dark set of stairs.  Midnight, of course, returned to his favorite spot on the third step as soon as he was done eating.

                                                                     
                                                                        BREAKING A MIRROR

There was a golden-framed mirror which had been a priceless heirloom in the Romanov family for eight generations.  Although the Romanov fortune had dwindled to a meager subsistence, they had still managed to hold onto the mirror.  In 1867, the current Romanov family lived in a simple hovel, but the mirror was still hanging on the wall in the main hallway.  The elegant mirror seemed grossly out of place in the modest home, but Elliot Romanov paused before it every day with pride as he considered his reflection and straightened his hair.  In the most darkest and humble times of his life, the mirror served to remind him of his elevated heritage.  It was the one thing that kept him from feeling like a mere commoner.    

One night Elliot's boss, Mr. Sterns, came by for dinner.  The man had actually insinuated his own invitation and insisted on coming.  He was a large, obnoxious, and imposing man who treated Elliot like a worm.  Elliot hated the man and he suffered his company all through dinner.  Mr. Sterns got uproariously drunk and he behaved worse that usual.  He grabbed Mrs. Romanov inappropriately and he hollered at the Romanov children.  But the worst affront came as he was leaving for the evening.  He stumbled as he was putting on his coat and smashed head first into the Romanov's priceless mirror, shattering it into a million pieces.  He grumbled irritably as though the Romanovs had done him a disservice in the placement of their mirror, and then he left without offering an apology.  Elliot stared at the shattered mirror, mortified. 

He vowed revenge on Mr. Sterns, but it had to be a covert and secret revenge, as he couldn't risk losing the job that provided for his family.  He proceeded to conduct a campaign of small annoyances and inconveniences in Mr. Sterns' life.  He placed a nail in Mr. Sterns' shoe when he wasn't wearing them.  He loosened the wheel of his carriage so that it came off on a muddy road.  He broke his fountain pen, causing Mr. Sterns to get an ink stain on his shirt.  Mr. Sterns never suspected that Elliot was the source of these minor grievances.  Elliot just smiled placidly at his boss's suffering.  This went on for seven years until one night when Elliot was trying to procure a wasp's nest to leave in Mr. Sterns' desk.  As Elliot dislodged the nest, a couple of the bees stung him.  Elliot didn't know until that moment that he was highly allergic to bees.  He was found dead the next morning.  Soon after, Mr. Sterns was greatly relieved when he found that his string of bad luck had finally broken.       

So there it is.  You learn something new every day. 

The Matrix: A Study of Internet Identities

For about 11 years now, I have gone by the name "nuclearheadache" on the internet.  I have used the name for websites, forums, email, and of course, as the title of this blog.  I came up with the name on the spot, without giving it much thought.  I was creating an account, I was prompted to choose a username, and I had a really, really bad headache at the time.  There wasn't much more to it than that.  Since then, though, the name has become a persona, a projection of my personality, or at least a projection of those aspects of my personality that I chose to share on the internet.  The name suggests something that a name like, say, hellokittysuperfan116 would not.  

In real life I am Bryan White.  I'm a 35 year old factory worker.  I'm married.  I have a daughter.  I'm left handed, and I have grey eyes.  My identity in the real world is at the mercy of countless things which are beyond my control, not the least of which is my name, picked for me at birth and not a matter I had the slightest input in.  My hair has decided to abandon me for the most part, also without consulting me at all.  This undeniably affects my image in the world, again, in ways that are beyond my control.  Although nuclearheadache  is not my real name, and although the persona it encapsulates is an artificial construction by virtue of the fact that I can select and choose what constitutes that persona, in some ways these things are more real precisely because my choice was involved.   A username is a creative expression.  A given name is an outfit someone else dressed you in.   A virtual avatar is an artistic choice.  Your face in a random accident of genetics.  

Yet, there is honesty in a face.  A lifetime of choices, good and bad are written there.  A face displays your virtues and your faults.  There is a paradox here.  On the one hand, our internet identities are more genuine expressions of ourselves because they are more deliberately chosen and they are less subject to factors  beyond our control.  On the other hand, our real life identities are more genuine because we can not hide our faults behind an artificial construction.  You might say that a  person who knows us in real life is much more likely to see us at our worst because they are more  liable to see us under pressure as we deal with real problems and we struggle in the real world.  But yet, there are times when a person uses the anonymity of the internet to reveal hidden sides of themselves that they usually keep hidden in normal society.

If you're reading this, that means you're on the internet just like I am.  We all have a foot in either of these two worlds, and we all possess these dual identities, and so the question becomes:  Which one of these worlds is more real?  Which one has more of our true selves invested in it?  Who really know us better; the people we interact with online, or the people we interact with in life?  And in turn, which of these people are more real to us?  The consideration of these questions is one of the major themes of the movie The Matrix. 

Years ago, I used to have this friend that was very suspicious of the internet, and of computers in general.  I'm sure you've all known someone like this at some point.  I was sitting around with him one night and we were talking and he said that some day aliens might land here and they would find the streets deserted, the buildings empty, and everything rotting and rusting away.  There would just be silent desolation everywhere.  Eventually, these aliens would find their way to our homes, where they would find each and everyone of us in some back room plugged into a virtual world of easy and infinite possibilities which we had long since chosen over the limiting confines of the real world.  I wasn't sure that I agreed with his pessimistic outlook, but as an aspiring writer, I appreciated that there were some intriguing possibilities for fiction there, if someone could figure out how to make a story out of the idea.  So when I heard about The Matrix, my first reaction was a smile that someone else had had the same idea.  

On its surface, The Matrix seems to be a simple story of people being freed from an artificial, virtual world so that they can live in the real world.  This would appear to be the primary struggle of the characters in the film.  The virtual world appears to represent a form of bondage, and the fight is for the freedom of reality.  A straightforward reading of the narrative suggests this unmistakably.  But if you look a little closer and dig a little deeper, you find it's a little more complicated.  Beneath the obvious surface, you find that the real world and the online world have been switched.  Each one represents the other in the reality of the film.  This is a mirror image of our world, through the looking glass and flipped around backwards.   

The first and biggest clue to this switch is in the names.  In the film's virtual world Keanu Reeves' character is named "Thomas A. Anderson", while in the film's real world he is known as "Neo."  However, the name Neo is clearly recognizable as a type of internet username, as are the names of the other characters, "Morpheus", "Trinity", "Tank", and so on.  A big point is even made, during the climax of the story, of Reeves embracing the username over the Anderson name, which is clearly recognizable as a type of real name in our world.  The point being that "Anderson" is a kind of slave name that belongs to his former life of captivity. 

On the surface of the story, this captivity involves being held prisoner by the artificiality of the Matrix.  But the juxtaposition of the name-types reveals a deeper level.  The captivity that the Anderson name represents is the captivity of the circumstances of the material world.  It's the captivity of his job, the suit and tie he has to wear, the neighbor's garbage that Smith mentions.  It is the captivity to the mundane realities of life.  The Neo identity, as Smith again points out, is another life, lived in computers.  It is Anderson's online persona.  As Neo, he has a much grander purpose and a far less restricted existence.  It is  breaking these chains of reality's restrictions that defines Neo and ultimately leads him to the realization of his true self. 

Since this scenario suggests that the Matrix represents our physical reality, this might seem as though it is contradicted by the superhuman feats of agility and bullet-time virtuosity displayed by the characters within the Matrix.  However, the dividing line in the symbolism between the real and online worlds is not simply between the Matrix and outside the Matrix.   The actual point of demarcation between real and online is the moment when Neo wakes up from the Matrix.  By following Neo's path to becoming the "one", as opposed to the zero he apparently was in his former life, The Matrix explores the duality between the limiting realities of real life and the possibilities of the online life.  From the soul-crushing dullness of corporate America Neo is initiated into a realm of instant downloads, customizable options, and fantasy role-playing.

That is the real trick of The Matrix.  Although it plays like a dire warning and an indictment of the virtual world, it is actually an endorsement of it and exploration of its place in modern life.  In the question of where our true selves lie, it falls firmly on the side of the persona that we create by choice.  The society of the real world, it argues, is a system that keeps us under control with its agents checking our every step.  The internet provides our minds with an opportunity to break free and become the person we were actually meant to be.  You may agree or disagree with this, but the hidden secret of the film remains.  The Matrix is the real world.                        

About a Dream

For those of you who don't know, I write another blog called The Encyclopedia of Counted Sheep.  It's somewhere between a dream journal, and a collection of short stories.  Basically, I use ideas that I get from my dreams as a creative starting point for short works of fiction, and I build from there; sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.  It all depends.  Check it out, if you want.  Apparently my subconscious has some wild theories if its own.  

I bring this up, not just as a shameless attempt at cross-promotion, but because today's post is about a dream I once had when I was a kid.  I'm writing about it here because there's more to the story than just the dream itself, as you'll see.  So, it's kind of like I'm guest blogging on my own blog.  It feels kind of weird, but that might have something to do with the painkillers that the dentist has me on.  If I was over on the other blog, I guess I would call this post "Footprints in the Snow", but I'm not, so I won't.  You might walk away from this story thinking I'm a little out of my mind, but I guess I'll have to take that risk.  Anyhow, without further pointless rambling, I'll turn the floor over to my guest blogger, myself, who also just happens to be me: 

I had this dream when I was about 12 years old.  There was this blonde girl that I liked at school.  In the dream, she was my girlfriend and we were walking through the halls of the school, holding hands, which is probably as exciting as my imagination got at that age.  We passed everyone I knew in the halls, and I could tell from the looks on their faces that they were suitably impressed.  I had a big beaming smile on my face.  Everything was wonderful.  I couldn't have been happier...

...and then I woke up.

Except...I hadn't really woken up.  I was still dreaming.  I just dreamt that I woke up.  Nevertheless, I was quite disappointed to learn that my little stroll through the school hall with the blonde girl hadn't been real.  I refused to accept it.  I got out of bed and ran out of the house.  It was a sunny day outside; one of those days in late winter, early spring, where the snow had melted back to little patches on the grass.  I went to the spot where the school had been in my dream.  There was nothing but an open field there now.  I stared at it, stunned and defeated, shaking my head.  But then I noticed something.  In a big patch of snow in the middle of the field, I saw two sets of footprints crossing the length of it.  It was real.  We had walked hand in hand on this very spot.  The school had faded away, but the traces of our feet remained in the snow.

I was so excited, that I had to tell someone.  I ran back towards home, and I went to the next door neighbor's house where this girl who I was friends with lived.  I knocked at the door, and when she answered, I asked her to come outside so that I could show her something.  She had the same melting patches of snow in her backyard that were everywhere else.  I pointed out a big tree that was next to one of the snow patches, and I told her that we had to sit down beside it and go to sleep.  She looked at me a little strangely, but she agreed.  Now, I'll remind you that this was all still a dream at this point, but inside this dream we sat down under the tree and "fell asleep" in a matter of seconds and we dreamt that we were running across the snow patch.  When we reached the edge of it, I yelled "WAKE UP!", and there we were under the tree again.  We got to our feet, and I showed her the footprints in the snow that we had made in our dream.  Then, in a voice that somehow didn't quite seem to be my own, I turned to her and said, "See, dreams are real."

The moment I said that, everything changed.  We weren't in the backyard anymore.  We were down at the town square, standing under the clock tower on the courthouse.  It was just getting dark out.  I saw the blonde girl in the shadows of some trees across the park.  I tried to call out to her, but it suddenly seemed like everything was falling apart and spinning out of control.  I realized that this was all just another dream, and I could feel it slipping away.  The clock on the courthouse began to spin faster and faster, and it kept chiming the hour over and over until I finally woke up for real, and realized that it was my alarm going off.

I thought about this dream all day at school.  I couldn't get it out of my head.  It had felt more real than any dream I had ever had.  I passed the day in a kind of dazed preoccupation.  After school I ran into the neighbor girl.  I was itching to tell somebody about this weird dream that I had had.  I started telling her about it, but when I got to the part where I had knocked on her door, she had the strangest look on her face.  She told me that she had had the exact same dream, only it had been from her own perspective.  She told me about how I had come to the door.  She told me about falling asleep under the tree.  She told me about my strange voice when I said, "See, dreams are real."  She told me about the clock tower, and how she had turned around and I was gone.  She knew everything.

I wasn't sure what to make of this.  Neither was she.  We tried for months after that to repeat the experience.  Every time we saw each other, we asked about about the dreams the other had had, but they were never the same.  Eventually we gave up hope on the whole thing. Clearly, it was a one time thing, never to be repeated. 

I have no explanation to offer for this, no theories.  I leave it to you all to figure it out.  Was it just the power of suggestion?  Did I just imagine the whole thing?  Was there some sort of psychic phenomenon at work?  Am I still dreaming?  Maybe you just think I'm completely full of it, and I just made it all up.  I can certainly understand that viewpoint, and you're free to think that, but I promise you that it's completely true.  I don't understand it at all, but it did happen.  So...what do you think?

Trying to Understand Relativity (part 5)

It was suggested to me that I read Einstein's own book on Relativity.  Well, I tried to follow up on this suggestion, but I found myself a little in over my head.  I've read difficult books before, Freud, Kant, Sartre, Nietzsche, and so on.  It took some effort to get through those books (Sartre especially), but at least I never felt completely bogged down in the rougher patches, and I was always fascinated enough by their ideas that I was compelled to continue.  I'm not sure why I should find myself having more trouble with this Einstein book, but I do.  I would read a couple of pages, re-reading most of the paragraphs a few times, and then I would set it aside at the point when I felt like I was going to pass out.  Then, when I'd go back and try to pick up where I left off, I'd be completely lost and I'd have to start over.  After several times of doing that, I think I've about had it.  But don't just take my word for it, check it out:

IN your schooldays most of you who read this book made acquaintance with the noble building of Euclid’s geometry, and you remember—perhaps with more respect than love—the magnificent structure, on the lofty staircase of which you were chased about for uncounted hours by conscientious teachers. By reason of your past experience, you would certainly regard every one with disdain who should pronounce even the most out-of-the-way proposition of this science to be untrue. But perhaps this feeling of proud certainty would leave you immediately if some one were to ask you: “What, then, do you mean by the assertion that these propositions are true?” Let us proceed to give this question a little consideration.

Geometry sets out from certain conceptions such as “plane,” “point,” and “straight line,” with which we are able to associate more or less definite ideas, and from certain simple propositions (axioms) which, in virtue of these ideas, we are inclined to accept as “true.” Then, on the basis of a logical process, the justification of which we feel ourselves compelled to admit, all remaining propositions are shown to follow from those axioms, i.e. they are proven. A proposition is then correct (“true”) when it has been derived in the recognised manner from the axioms. The question of the “truth” of the individual geometrical propositions is thus reduced to one of the “truth” of the axioms. Now it has long been known that the last question is not only unanswerable by the methods of geometry, but that it is in itself entirely without meaning. We cannot ask whether it is true that only one straight line goes through two points. We can only say that Euclidean geometry deals with things called “straight line,” to each of which is ascribed the property of being uniquely determined by two points situated on it. The concept “true” does not tally with the assertions of pure geometry, because by the word “true” we are eventually in the habit of designating always the correspondence with a “real” object; geometry, however, is not concerned with the relation of the ideas involved in it to objects of experience, but only with the logical connection of these ideas among themselves.

Now, I have really no idea what he's talking about here.  I know what "Euclidean Geometry" is, and I'm familiar with the concepts he's talking about, but I have no clue what he's getting at here.  Is he saying that the truth of the principles of geometry are only verifiable by their own internal logic and not by empirical observation?  Is he's saying that they ought to be only verified in this manner to be more "pure"?  This is only the first two paragraphs and I'm totally lost.  I would argue that the principles of geometry are empirically verifiable, because the shapes that geometry deals with are abstract forms of shapes that occur in natural observable reality.  I would argue that "2+2=4" is as abstract as it gets, but a person can take four buttons and empirically observe the truth for themselves.  I would argue this, but I'd probably be arguing with nothing but my own confusion.  I'm probably not even in the same ballpark where Einstein is pitching this particular game.  It's probably not even the right sport or even the right season.  I'm alone on the field, yelling at the empty stands. 

Maybe the problem is that I've been trying to read the book online.  Maybe I need to get a hard copy of it.  I don't know.  I would have liked to have more to say, and more progress to report.  I'm sure you would have liked something more interesting to read than a story of how someone threw a book against a wall.  I know people are trying to help with their suggestions, and I do appreciate it, but I think I make the most progress when I stick to my original plan and don't allow myself to get sidetracked.  I may return to the Einstein book, and if I run across a copy of it at the book store, I'll pick it up.  For now, I'm going to stick with my houses and their neighborly inhabitants.  See you next time.        

Individuality Is Not a Hairstlyle

The other day my Daughter insisted on showing me these pictures on the internet of these girls with "Scene" hairstyles, which is apparently a new fad.  The style involves teasing your hair up into a big mess and dyeing stripes in it here and there, until the end result basically looks like a raccoon crawled up onto your head and died with a pink bow in its mouth.  On one of the sites where one of these girls had posted photos of their cool new hairdo, the girl went on to complain about people staring at her in public because she was "different" and they couldn't handle her "being herself."  Now folks, I may not be as old as I look, but I've been around long enough to witness at least a dozen permutations of this nonsense.  I heard it from the punks, the thrashers, the trashers, the goths, the geeks, and the freaks.  It's always the same line.

I'm not trying to pick on teenagers here.  God knows, they're confused enough.  As far as I'm concerned, they can string Christmas lights in their hair if it makes them happy.  I'm just tired of hearing them defend their fashion choices in the name of individuality.  I've got some news for you, kid: If they have a name for your look, it's not original.  It's not a showcase of your unique identity or an expression of your deep, inner self.  It's just a fad.  I don't care if you're the only kid in your school dressing this way.  I don't care if you're the only kid in your town dressing this way.  I don't care how weird and outrageous you look.  I don't care if your parents hate it.  I don't care if you're getting funny looks from the old people at the mall.  It's still just a fad.  You have joined a herd.  You are a follower.  You're not "being yourself"; you're being a sheep.  Baaaaaa.....

Now, I don't believe in much, and I've gone through countless changes over the years, but if there is one thing that I have always and will always hold sacred, it's thinking for yourself.  This is where true individuality has to start, with your mind, not with your clothes.   It starts on the inside and works its way out, not the other way around.  You have to flip the light switch and get the power flowing to your brain.  Question everything.  Think about everything.  Don't walk the well-worn path if there's a more reasonable and clearer way to the truth.  Find the ideas and the convictions that will serve you best in life, and don't compromise them for anything.  Like the things you want to like.  Listen to the music you want to listen to.  And wear what you want to wear, not what the internet tells you the non-conformists are wearing this year.   

I realize that true individuality is no easy accomplishment, and I almost can't blame these kids for looking for a short-cut, but I'm afraid there isn't any.  People have treated me like I was weird my whole life.  It's not something I aspire to.  It's not even something I'm proud to admit.  I'd change it if I could, but it's an unavoidable consequence of the fact that I do things my own way.  I look normal enough, but anyone who spends enough time around me eventually starts to give me that sidelong glance.  No one takes me very seriously, and most people think I'm a fool.  I've come to accept that, and I can only hope that I'll get the last laugh.  Somewhere along the line, these kids figured out that "different" people get treated this way.  So they put on a costume that guarantees that they'll get the same reaction, then they take that reaction as validation of their individuality.  Sorry Billy, it doesn't work that way.  It's nothing but a cheap substitute.  You might even call it a defense mechanism.  After all, it's a lot easier to get ridiculed for the counter-culture clothes your wearing, than for revealing a vulnerable part of your true self.

Some people might look at all this with an indulgent smile and say, "Well, you know how teenagers are.  They're just trying new things, and trying to figure out who they are."  I couldn't disagree with this attitude more.  A person's best hope for achieving independent thought lies in their teenage years, when their minds are naturally looking for their own ideas and their own identities as they venture out into real life.  If they accept some substitute, placebo form of individuality, then they risk never knowing the real thing.  The raccoon-haired girl will grow up and get a "normal" hair-cut.  She'll car-pool, make vegetable trays, and take her place in that thick grey herd of adult banality.  She'll be embarrassed when she finds those old pictures of herself.  She'll consider individuality as a phase she once went through, and a way she once did her hair, instead of realizing the open road of possibility that it could have been.

I think that would be a real tragedy.     

Jack the Ripper

The other night they aired this show on The Science Channel about Jack the Ripper which purported to have "new evidence" concerning the century-and-a-half old mystery of the serial killer's identity.  I tuned in to watch it with a fair amount of skepticism.  Most Jack the Ripper theories seem to revolve around the idea that there's some Earth-shattering revelation or twist behind the identity itself.  They generally assume that Jack the Ripper was someone important or famous who's name pops up elsewhere in the historical record.  The only real justification for this assumption is the fact that it would be extremely anti-climactic to find out that Jack the Ripper was just "some guy."  But yet, that's probably just what he was.  Who, really, were David Berkowitz or Jeffrey Dahmer or Ed Gein or any other known serial killers aside from the horrible things they've done?  We expect intriguing mysteries to have intriguing answers, but that isn't necessarily always the case.  This is just yet another instance where people fall for the most irrational fallacies in their quest to believe in something exciting, and they ignore more level-headed approaches at the truth.   

Unfortunately, level heads are usually in short supply in these sort of documentaries.  The History Channel, The Discovery Channel, and other cable networks run these shows from time to time, where some so-called expert with questionable credentials pursues some personal theory.  Sometimes, such as the recent Apocalypse Island, these documentaries can be a complete disaster.  This one on Jack the Ripper was more modest in its scope and its failures.  The problem isn't always with the theories themselves, and this guy's Jack the Ripper theory was at least within the realm of plausibility.  No, the problem is usually with the way they approach the theories.  There's always something, that one fatal touch, that undermines their image as the professional scholar and puts them firmly in the category of a crack-pot.  I've engaged in plenty of my own crack-pot theorizing, of course, so I can't really throw stones.  But then again, The History Channel isn't supplying me with a camera crew and financing my expedition to the ends of the Earth.  These shows always leave me feeling a little outraged when I think that there are people out there working on genuine research projects which are probably grossly underfunded, while these jack-asses are grandstanding on cable TV.  

This Jack the Ripper documentary followed this same familiar pattern.  The theory was that  Jack the Ripper was a mortician named Robert Mann who worked in the Whitechapel area where the Ripper murders were committed.  As I said, it's a plausible theory, more plausible than most of the ones I've heard and I'm not going to completely dismiss it.  The problem here is the logic behind most of the guy's "new evidence."  If you were to follow this guy's line of thought, then any mortician on the planet would look like a murder suspect.  He pointed out such gems as the fact that Mann had access to the bodies after the murders.  Well...yeah, he was the mortician.  He pointed out the fact that Mann spent a lot of time around dead bodies.  Well...yeah, he's a mortician.  He pointed out the fact that the murders all happened in the area surrounding Mann's mortuary.  Well...yeah, he was the mortician for that area.  Starting to see a pattern here?  The term "circumstantial evidence" would be an understatement if the term "evidence" wasn't already a ludicrous exaggeration.  Why not point the finger at the investigating police officer?  Why was he so interested in the murders?  Wasn't he at all the crimes scenes?  Hmm, sounds suspicious to me. 

It wasn't all a complete wash.  He did point out the Ripper's surgical skill with the knife.  But this only suggests the possibility of a medical background and is hardly conclusive.  The only really solid fact that he had that could possibly link Mann to the murders was that Mann had gotten tuberculosis and died around the same time the murders stopped.  Now, that's pretty good, but since I don't know more about the murders and the time frame they covered, and since people were probably dropping like flies from tuberculosis every other day, I can't really draw any firm conclusions from this.

And there was one interesting statement made by a criminal profiler that the guy consulted.  He said that Jack the Ripper didn't cut to kill; he killed in order to cut.  The excessive nature of the incisions showed that the killer really relished the use of the knife.  This was considered as a further consistency with Mann's occupation as a mortician.  The only thing I could think was, "Geez, doesn't the guy get enough of that at work?"                                     

If I Were in the Fortune Cookie Game

I love Chinese food.  At least, I love the heavily Americanized version that they serve at the buffets around here, which probably bares as close a resemblance to the genuine thing as a cheeseburger does to a chandelier.  Still, I love all those little spicy pieces of chicken served in all kinds of different sweet sauces.  After I've helped myself to my third or forth heaping plate, the server usually shows up with a bill, along with a fortune cookie for each person at the table.  I'm not a huge fan of the actual cookie.  It pretty much tastes like a piece of cardboard covered in envelope glue.  But I do find the fortunes entertaining.  I have noticed though, that as frequently as I dine at these buffets and as frequently as I open these cookies, I have never once gotten a duplicate fortune.  Not that that's too incredible.  There are probably thousands upon thousands of fortunes out there.  Still, it would have to be a possibility if some measure wasn't taken to prevent it.    

And prevent it they must.  If someone were to recieve a duplicate fortune even once, it would destroy the entire mystique of the fortune cookie.  So how do they do it?  Even though there are thousands of fortunes, it's highly unlikely that they print a unique fortune for each and every cookie.  They must print thousands, possibily millions of copies of each fortune, depending on the size of the cookie operation in question.  Even given the odds involved in an entirely random distribution, sooner or later someone would be bound to get the same fortune.  There would have to be a system.   

I suppose I could have asked someone at the restaurant, but I probably would have gotten nothing but blank stares in return.  It possible that it never even crossed the minds of the people back at the fortune cookie home office that any of this could even be an issue.  They probably just print the fortunes, box them up, ship them out, and take their chances.  Still, I took some time out of my busy, busy schedule to solve this crucial problem, and I offer my solution to any fortune cookie entrepeneurs out there, free of charge.  I know.  I know.  No need to thank me.  I'm more than happy to help.    

Ok, so here's how it would work: Let's say that you have 500,000 unique fortunes.  You take these fortunes and split them up into 50 sets of 10,000 and you number and box each set seperately.  No set contains a duplicate fortune and each set contains fortunes completely different from the other sets, but each particular set contains the same ten thousand fortunes.  Then, the restaurants on your client list would have to keep track of which sets they've already ordered.  Maybe they'd have a sheet or something and they'd cross off the sets they've already ordered, making sure not to re-order the same set.  This way any one particular restaurant would never get a duplicate fortune until they had gone through the entire series of 500,000 and yet the fortune cookie company could still print millions of copies of each fortune.  If you really wanted to play it safe, you could issue a new series of 500,000 every year, as long as your warehouse Confusius can keep up with that kind of output.   

Of course, there's always the possibility that the customer could go to a different restaurant  currently working from the same set, but hey...nothing's perfect, and the odds would still be greatly dimished.  With no system, with just a completely random distribution, the odds would be 1 in 500,000 that a repeat customer would get a duplicate fortune and that number would divide in half with each return visit.  Sooner or later it would happen, and the customer's faith in those magical cookies would be tragically crushed forever.  

Maybe there's already a system like this, and I've wasted my valuable time reinventing it.  More likely, no one cares.  But hey, if you're going to hide pithy little notes inside of cookies in the hopes of having people believe that they're a personal message meant only for them, then you've got to put some effort in maintaining the illusion.  Anyway, it's none of my concern.  I just came for the spicy chicken.