Generation Pacman

Recently, after reading some things online, I was disappointed to learn that the Atari 2600 version of Pacman isn't held in very high regard.  In fact, it seems that most of my peers think it downright sucked and that it's universally considered a disaster in the world of video games.  Apparently everyone who was anyone hated the game and in one collective voice the whole wide world joined hands and told Atari that it was a huge failure.  Well, this certainly would have been news to my brother and I back in 1982.  We loved the game.  We actually bought our first Atari specifically so that we could play that game.  We were tired of pumping quarters into the arcade version at the local ice cream shop and we wanted something that we could play whenever we wanted.  We spent hours upon hours playing it.  My brother once played one game that lasted almost an entire day.  This was before games had a pause feature, so the only way he could get a break to go to the bathroom was to hand over the joystick to me with the quixotic stipulation that he would kill me if I died too many times.  I wouldn't hesitate to say that I have fonder memories of the Atari version than of the actual arcade version.

But was it as good as the arcade version?  Of course not.  No Atari adaptations of popular arcade games were ever as good as their coin-operated counterparts.  You accepted that without giving it a second thought.  You just figured that was the price you paid to be able to play the game at home.  It was the natural order of things.  If we had turned on a game and it had looked as good as the arcade version, we wouldn't have known what to do.  Our brains would probably have splattered all over the walls.  If I look back at it now, it's through adult eyes and 29 years of advancing video game technology.  Yes, Pacman only faces one way.  Yes, the maze layout is monotonous and constrictive.  Yes, the trapdoor exits at the top and bottom of the screen are fairly useless.  Yes, the ghosts flicker and they're all the same color.  The thing is though, my brother and I didn't care about any of that at the time.  We were playing Pacman, in our rooms.  Wow!

Atari 2600 Version

This isn't the first time I've been treated to the sight of the internet unzipping its fly and pissing all over my childhood memories.  I'm turning 35 in a little over a week and my generation seems to hold a certain ascendant position in Internet culture at the moment.  We're just old enough to wax nostalgic, and yet still young enough to know what "WTF" and "BRB" stand for.  As a result, the internet is inundated with all kinds of "hip" pop culture references from my childhood.  Sometimes this can be kind of cool.  It can be neat to find out that something that I thought only I and maybe a handful of kids in my neighborhood knew about was actually a big deal with other kids out there.  We weren't all connected like this back then, of course, so sometimes the internet feels like this big class reunion to me.

Arcade Version

But then you have these people.  They like to speak with such...authority.  They say this sucked or this was awesome, and to anyone who was cool it was as obvious as the blue sky.  Well, I'm here to tell you, it wasn't like that.  It's never like that.  I grew up with these people.  A lot of the stuff that they so aggressively claim was "cool", frankly only kids that ate paste were into.  A lot of the stuff that they tell you "sucked", only the dopey eyed fat kid with the fudge-sickle mustache was the one complaining about it.  I never thought someone was cool because of the toys they played with, or the cartoons they watched.  Only kids who were little obnoxious jerks in training would have thought like that.  I would never even have conceived of it.  I was too busy playing in my room.

I'm not saying I have a problem with someone who didn't like the Atari version of Pacman or anything else that I liked as a kid.  I have a problem with people who presume to speak on my behalf, and make blanket claims about what "everybody" thought about this thing or the other.  If you didn't like it, you didn't like it.  There was no codified standard that everyone fell in line with.  Kids argued endlessly about these things then, just like they still do now.  People who hop online and declare that  everybody knew such and such was cool are people who never got over these old, stupid arguments and now they're living out some delusional fantasy where they get the last word in.

Besides, as far as this Pacman thing is concerned, I think there's a good deal of hindsight involved in these critiques.  Unlike these self-proclaimed pop culture authorities, I don't have the slightest idea what other kids thought of the game, and I was only six or seven at the time, so I can't provide you with detailed sales figures.  I just know that I can't imagine being quite so jaded back then to have been so nitpicky about the game.  It's hard to believe that these kids were standing on the very threshold of home video game technology moaning about flickering ghosts.  I have to figure that either they're embarrassed about the wide-eyed children they once were, or someone had a far, far more privileged childhood than I did.

Fun with Song Lyrics

Although you may not be familiar with the term, I'm sure you're probably all familiar with the rock lyric phenomenon known as the "mondegreen."  This is the term for misheard lyrics, whether it's Jimi Hendrix making out with another guy, or John Fogerty giving directions to the bathroom.  I'm been guilty of this quite a few times myself.  My favorite instance is the Warrant song "Heaven."  By misunderstanding two lines of the song, I complete misunderstood the narrative behind it.  Here's what I thought the opening lines were:

Got a picture of your house.

You're standing by the door.

It's black & white and faded,

and looking pretty worn.

See the fact without a word.

See the wedding in the back.

Memories of a greater man,

they're really coming back.

Now, from the highlighted lines and the rest of the song, I pieced together the story here.  In his younger days, the singer had been in love with a girl.  It seemed like they'd really last.  It seemed like they were going to share their lives together.  It seemed like "Heaven" wasn't too far away.  Sadly though, things don't always work out.  The promise of their relationship didn't hold, and now he's left looking at old photographs and regretting his lost love.  He sees the "fact" of the wedding and that she moved on and married someone else.  He sees it "without a word", because...well, it's a photograph.  It would be nice, touching, and make perfect sense if it wasn't for the fact that the highlighted lyrics should actually read:

See the factory where I worked,

silhouetted in the back.

Ohhhh...Oh, I see.  This is just a story about how they were young and he worked in a factory or something.  Yeah, that's pretty deep.  Thanks a lot Warrant for ruining the song with your "actual" lyrics.  Okay, moving on.  

In the world of country music, I've noticed a somewhat similar phenomenon.  The problem here isn't mis-hearing the lyrics.  I can understand the words just fine.  It's just that sometimes in the interest of rhythm and rhyme schemes, sentence structure gets sacrificed.   I know what they're trying to say, but if I really feel like being a smart-ass (which I usually do) then it's easy to take these things the wrong way.  Here, I'll show you what I mean with the Colin Raye song "Love, Me":

I heard those words just hours before

my grandma passed away

in the doorway of the church

where me and Grandpa stopped to pray.

"Look over yonder, boy.  There's a church where we can pull on over and get some prayin' done."..."But Grandpa, I think Grandma's starting to stroke out.  She's twitching all funny and foaming at the mouth."..."Well, bring her along.  Ain't no better place to die than the house of the Lord.  Let's just hope we don't lose her before we get her through the door.  Yee Haw!"  Or then we have the Bryan White song "Rebecca Lynn":

I said, please, Becky would you marry me

prom night in the car out by the curb.

Alright Becky, maybe it's not my place to give relationship advice, but I think this guy might be moving a little fast.  I know he bought the corsage and paid for dinner, but isn't a little much expecting you to marry him on Prom night, and in a car out by the curb of all places?  Not exactly a girl's dream wedding, and how is this supposed to work?  Where are the guests supposed to sit, the back seat?  Heck, where's the minister supposed to be?  Maybe the "car" is a taxi and the driver doubles as a justice of the peace.  Maybe he's talking euphemistically.  Maybe he's talking about getting "married" in the conjugal sense.  If that's the case, we'll leave you kids alone and move on to the Billy Ray Cyrus song "Could've Been Me":

My buddy John said you looked real pretty,

and you acted like you were in love.

He said the preacher asked for objections,

and he thought about standing up.

Well, I told John he must have been crazy,

because you were just about to say, "I do."

He just gave me a wink and said all he could think

was it could have been me with you.

Now, technically, I suppose there's no problem with the grammar or sentence structure here, but I can't be the only one who thinks that last line sounds just a little tiny bit like John is proposing a union with Billy Ray that's still illegal in many states, especially with his heavily suggestive wink.  Hey John, I appreciate that you're trying to be a good friend and everything, but you gotta give poor Billy Ray some time here.  Can't you see that he's still trying to get over this girl?  Be patient, man.  Just don't come flying out of the closet like that when the guy's clearly got a broken heart.

Anyway, see you all later.       

How I Wish Mood Rings Worked

Rachel Hoyt over at Rhyme Me a Smile is conducting some sort of Smiley Sociology Study which involves getting a broad cross-section of bloggers to write posts about mood rings.  It's like Gorillas in the Mist, but instead of gorillas and mist you have bloggers writing about novelty jewelery.  Afterwards, I imagine she'll tabulate her findings with lots of charts and graphs in her secret lab.  Then she'll take the results to the pentagon in a sealed envelope, so that they can figure out effective ways to use mood ring technology with soldiers in the field.  In other words, I don't have the slightest clue what any of this about.  However, I've always found mood rings to be somewhat interesting, so I figured I was up for the challenge.  I looked up some information to learn how mood rings work, and I was disappointed to learn that they work by nothing more mysterious than skin temperature.  Basically, it's like someone took that thermometer sticker off the side of your fish tank and made a ring out of it.  No, this just wasn't going to cut it for me.  So I bring you my explanation of how mood rings ought to work, if the world were truly a place of magic and wonder. 

In Ancient Egypt around 1438 B.C. some workers were digging in a rock quarry in the Nile basin when they discovered an odd looking rock crystal, a crystal which we know today as "morphite".  As it lay, the rock was black, but when the worker picked it up, he found that it turned a bright green.  The worker stood there mystified, staring at it, until another worker snatched it from his hand.  To the surprise of both men, the rock now turned blue.  Yet another worker came up and grabbed the rock from the other two men.  In his hand the rock now turned red.  The three men hurried to show their discovery to the slave master who was supervising the work at the quarry.  The slave master was quite impressed with the rock.  He quickly had the three workers executed, and then he posted guards around the spot where the rock crystal had been discovered.  At night the rocks were mined in secret, and taken by the cart load back to the Pharaoh's palace.

These rock crystals became known as "telling stones", and they were originally used primarily in court proceedings.  The accused would be brought before the Pharaoh and questioned with the telling stone in his right hand and his left hand raised.  If the stone turned a certain color at any time during the trial, the accused would immediately be taken away for execution.  It is from this ancient practice that the practice in modern court rooms of "swearing in" descended.  The telling stones long outlasted the ancient Egyptian dynasties.  In the middle ages, they were used by knights to locate the lair of dragons.  It was believed that the stone would turn a certain color in the proximity of a dragon, but in reality it was only registering the knight's increasing fear as he thought he was approaching a dragon's lair.  Finally, in 1884 H.M. Clausterfield had the idea of making jewelery out of the crystals and he coined the term "mood ring".  He placed a few dozen in the display window of his Manhattan shop, and they quickly became a sensation.   

But how do these "telling stones" work?  To answer this question requires a certain basic knowledge of brain bio-chemistry.  You see, the brain operates by generating a Neurological Electrical Resonance Field, or NERF for short.  It is this field which gives us the experience of consciousness or the mind.  Think of the brain as being like a television.  By itself it is just a solid piece of hardware, but when you apply electricity it becomes able to display sounds and images on the screen.  The sounds and images are not a part of the TV.  They are an ethereal construct who's existence is supported by the TV.  Likewise, the NERF is not a part of the brain and it can be no more found by the dissection of tissue than your favorite show can be found by disassembling the circuits and transistors of a TV.  The mind is just an electrical field, generated and maintained by the brain.

This field pulses at a variable frequency, depending on the mood and mental activity of the subject.  When the subject is in an agitated or distressed state, the field pulses at a very high frequency.  This is part of the body's natural defense mechanism.  The brain increases the energy output to the field in response to a sense of danger.  In this manner it compensates for the sense of danger by heightening mental acuity and alertness.  When the subject is in a relaxed and pacified stated, the field pulses at a much lower frequency, allowing the brain to preserve the chemicals it uses to generate the electrical energy for when it is needed. 

Naturally, these variations of frequency affect nerve impulses through-out the body.  There is an almost imperceptible vibration to the body that it is perfectly attenuated to this frequency.  The molecules of the body make tiny oscillations similar to the way a wine glass responds to sound waves.  Since this is a constant fact of our existence, we don't really notice it, but there is nowhere that this phenomenon is more acute than the epidermis.  As a result, the skin generates a separate field which is in tune with the NERF, known as the aura.  To certain highly sensitive individuals, this field is actually visible.  The light rays that pass near to the subject's body get distorted by this field, disrupting certain bands of the spectrum while accentuating others.  To our sensitive observer, it appears that there is a certain colored glow emanating from the subject.

This brings us to our mood ring.  You see, the color changing properties of the crystal, which captivated the fascination of people as far back as Ancient Egypt, are actually nothing more than an illusion.  In it's natural state, morphite is black in color.  In fact, morphite is always black in color.  It just has a coating on it's surface that is sensitive to the brain's electrical field in the same way as the human epidermis.  Actually, it's far more sensitive.  While the aura is only visible to certain people, the same effect can be seen by anyone who looks at a mood ring.  However, although the effect differs in degree, it is the same by nature.  The oscillation of the morphite's surface coating is simply distorting the spectrum of light rays in close proximity to the ring, making it appear as if it's turning different colors.  Often the effect lingers on the ring after the wearer has removed it, because the oscillation takes time to relax back into its normal equilibrium and return the ring to its normal black appearance.

Well, there you have it.  I realize now that I could have perhaps looked deeper into how brain chemistry actually affects skin temperature.  I suppose that could have been interesting.  But hey, what's done is done, and it is what is, and whatever.  I hope it brightened up your Sunday a little, at least.                         

My Blog Turns 50

I've known about blogging for years, but I had the misfortune of first learning about it from an article written by someone who dismissively described it as a bunch of narcissistic, self-indulgent whining about boring stuff that no one else cared about.  Foolishly, I accepted this critique without further investigation.  Most subsequent opinions that I heard were along the same derogatory lines.  Even the positive opinions sounded awful.  They all praised blogging for being so "raw" and "free form" and "unedited" and "yeah!"  Brother, that sounded like a bigger mess than what my dog leaves in the back yard.  Meanwhile, all this information was being filtered into my brain through the word "blog" itself; quite possible the dumbest, ugliest word in the English language.  I don't care if it's short for "web log".  I don't care if it's short for "baloney log".  Can't we call it something else?  Can't we call it something cool, like "Vampire Hunting"?  I'd like to say I was a vampire hunter before I died, but what can I do?  I'm just one man!

Ahem...I'm getting a little ahead on my story here.  So there I was, lost and wandering the internet.  Occasionally, I would run across a curiously babbling fellow traveler who would call out from the wayside, "Hey there, Check out this link where this guy talks about what I was saying yesterday about the thing.  You know?"  I would thank this odd, simple creature and make haste in the direction that it sent me.  That was interesting, I would think, as I continued on my way.  Gradually, the world's dimmest light bulb went off over my head and it finally dawned on me that these were blogs that these people were sending me to.  I learned that while they could be self-indulgent, they certainly didn't have to be boring.  I learned that people used the format in a wide variety of ways.  I learned that you could write about something other than the color of your cat's latest hairball.

Why it took me so long to realize this, I don't know.  Honestly, I'm a little slow sometimes.  For some time, I'd had the idea floating around in the back of my mind of starting my own web site where I'd post regular articles about my ideas, and maybe reviews, and whatever.  I knew nothing about HTML coding, and I didn't want to pay for web hosting, though.  Then this blatantly obvious revelation about blogs came along, and I realized, hey, I could do all that by writing a blog.  And so, out of the formless void "nuclearheadache" was created, and I saw what I had made and I said, "Yeah, alright.  That'll work.  I think I'll go make myself a roast beef sandwich."

My office, or whatever you want to call it.

The first post I ever wrote and posted on this blog was actually the Artificial Intelligence post, which is now buried in the archive somewhere in the middle of October.  I was dissatisfied with it when I first wrote it.  It seemed like a bad way to start.  It was too cold and impersonal.  It set the wrong kind of tone, and I wasn't sure where to go from there.  So I pulled it, and started over with a little snippet that basically just said, "Hey world, I'm here."  Eventually that got deleted as well.  As it stands now, the earliest post on the blog is about this documentary that they showed on The History Channel called Apocalypse Island.  This seems like a fairly random place to start, but in a way it's appropriate.  I made this blog to delve into everything from the big questions of our existence to the little trivial details of our lives, from The Big Bang to fortune cookies.  That first post falls somewhere squarely in the middle.

As things rolled along, I got a feel for what I was doing and a better sense of how this was going to work.  I would weave certain running themes and topics in and out of each other, picking up the threads now and then, and interspersing them with stand alone posts.  So far this has worked out well, and it always leaves me feeling like I've got a lot more to deal with down the road, so I haven't run out of material yet.  At first I felt like I was speaking to an empty auditorium, listening to the uncanny echo of my own voice.  Eventually some people started to drift in.  Some of them probably mistook the place for a bar, or they just wanted to use the restroom, but some of you have stayed and made your own contributions.  I thank you for that, and for helping me feel like this isn't completely wasted effort.   

From some of the opinions I mentioned above, it's clear that professional writers consider blogging to be the internet's version of vanity publishing, something any old fool can do.  Even the "positive" remarks that I mentioned are unmistakably condescending.  It's true that anyone can start a blog.  You can have a new one up and running in five minutes if you like.  But not everyone can write a blog and stick to it, and not everyone can create a blog that anyone will actually read.  In this homemade, do-it-your-self world of electronic words, it may seem like there's no quality control whatsoever, but like any other form of publishing the quality is controlled by you, the reader.  A bad blog will whither and die on the vine.  Even self-publishing has its own form of natural selection.

So here we are at post number 50.  It's been fun so far, and hopefully I can see this through to another 50 and beyond.  When I hit 100, I think I'll take time out again for another filler post...errr, I mean retrospective.  Until then, hopefully I can keep it entertaining.      

Trying to Understand Relativity (part 7)

I had planned to start off this post by correcting an error I made in the last relativity post.  I had said that a trip across a light year at 75% the speed of light would take 18 months, when actually it would be 16 months.  I was going to go into a lengthy explanation of how to figure this, but a lot has changed since then, and pursuing this mistake would be a waste of time.  You see, I've come to the conclusion that I've gotten completely off the track with this, and I need to approach the problem from a fresh angle.  I'm pretty sure that everything I've said up this point, and every piece of progress that I've thought I made is completely wrong.  So not only have I been making your brains hurt, I've been doing so with gross errors in logic and my ignorance of the concepts I've been trying to deal with.  For this I apologize.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here.  I've really been trying to put some genuine effort into figuring this out lately, and I want to give you some kind of idea where I'm at with this.  The best place to start would be with a comment I left on the last relativity post:

I was doing some actual reading on this today, and I came across an interesting explanation. Imagine you have a clock that works by bouncing a beam of light between two mirrors stacked on top of each other and facing each other. The interval between each bounce is one second. If you started to move the clock to the right, then it would look like the beam of light was traveling at an angle to a stationary observer because the position of one mirror would always be slightly to the right of where the other had been when the beam hits it. So from the stationary observer's perspective the beam of light would be traveling a farther distance between the mirrors. Since the speed of light is constant then the time it takes the light to reach each mirror is actually extended and therefore time becomes distorted. One second becomes 1.3 then 2 then 6 and so on, as the clock is pushed faster to the right. The exact amount of distortion can actually be calculated from the angle that the beam is skewed. But, if you were to run along side the clock, keeping pace with it, the beam would be straight up and down again and bouncing at perfect one second intervals. It's not just a matter of appearances. The distance the beam is traveling is actually relative to the observer.

So see, THIS I understand. It's the best explanation of relativity I've found. For the first time it gives me a perfectly clear idea of not only how but why relativity works. I just have to figure out how this relates to my scenario. Or maybe I need to come up with a new scenario. I don't know.

I was thrilled when I first discovered this illustration.  Finally, an explanation of relativity I understood.  I spend pretty much the entire shift at work that night bouncing that beam of light around between those two mirrors in my head as I went about the business of filling the machines and mopping the floor.  It actually made sense.  I just had to figure out how to apply this to Bob and Ann and I was home free.  

Unfortunately, as always, it turns out that none of this was going to be easy.  A few days later I had some quiet time to really think and dig into the situation.  It wasn't long before I came face to face with another huge problem.  You see, although the above illustration does a great job of explaining how an observer in one frame of reference can see time moving differently in another frame of reference that's in motion relative to his own, it doesn't help me understand how that time distortion affects the motion itself between the two frames.  That's the issue that I think is really at the heart of my thought experiment.  A message I sent to my friend, secondscout, who assured me he has the answers to all this, will demonstrate what I mean: 

Hey, since you're throwing your hat into the ring on this, I figured out something you can help me with. I found a good thought experiment the other day that explained the time dilation effect. I described it in the comments of my last post on my blog. It might be one you're already familiar with. Anyway, I think I have a good idea how and why the clock would look like it's running slower on a ship speeding away from you at near light speed. I'm having a problem now with the speed and distance the ship itself would appear to be going. Would it look like it's going it's actual speed, or would it look like it's traveling slower to the same degree as the time is slowed on board? Either way, I'm coming up with a problem.

I'll explain with a simpler version of my experiment that's closer to the classic twin paradox. Let's say Bob and his mother live in the same house. Bob hops aboard his rocket and takes off at 75% the speed of light. Now, to his mother watching at the window time appears to run slower aboard the ship. For every minute that passes aboard the ship, she sees 90 seconds pass on her clock at home. Now, if Bob looks back at his house, he sees the same thing. From his point of view, it looks like he's standing still and the house is zipping away from him at 75% the speed of light with a slower clock. From a relative standpoint it doesn't matter who's in a ship and who's in a house, it just matters that there's a gap widening between them and the speed that it's widening. It only makes sense to say he's going 75% the speed of light away from the house. His speed has to be calculated from a reference point.

Okay, so after Bob has traveled for a year, he stops. At 75% the speed of light, he's now 9 light months from the house. So when he looks back at the house, I would think it would appear that only three months have passed there since he left. At this point, I'd almost be willing to chalk all this business of slowing clocks and time dilation up to the most elaborate optical illusion of all time, caused simply by the delay in the light's travel time, and go take a nap, if it wasn't for one thing: The Mother.

See, it doesn't work out the same from her point of view. She can't look across the 9 light months and see him as he was 3 months after he left the house, because he wasn't stopped on the 9 light month spot 3 months after he left. He didn't stop there until a year after he left. So, supposedly she shouldn't see him reach that point and stop until 21 months after he's left the house.

But how can this be? They're both traveling at 75% the speed of light relative to each other. When Bob stops, they both stop. When they both look back, shouldn't they both see the same distance and difference between each other? Yet, it seems for the mother that she has to see Bob's speed slowed to the same degree as the time distortion. Meanwhile, Bob has to see the house move away from him at it's actual speed. At one year, he is 9 light months from the house. How could he truly say he was traveling at 75% the speed of light otherwise?

Now, you could try to look at from the opposite point of view. You could say the house was speeding away from Bob, and the mother looked back after a year across the 9 light month distance and saw Bob as he was three months after they parted. But the problem is that Bob stopping the ship is an event that happened at a specific position in time and space. It was that action that stopped the widening of the gap. It seems like everything would have to add up in agreement with exactly when and where it happened.

So, I hope this makes sense? I'm totally stumped. If you can help me out of this one, then I think I can figure the rest out. I think it's all a matter of flipping it around for his approach to House A. I think I was actually closer to the answer in my first couple of posts. If time on the ship appears to slow as it speeds away, shouldn't it appear to go faster as the ship approaches? I don't know. Maybe you can answer that one too.

I'm expecting a reply on this before too long.  I might copy it into the next post, with secondscout's permission, of course.  In the meantime, if anyone sees what I'm talking about and has any ideas, as always your contributions are quite welcome.  As you can see, it's two steps back and maybe half a step forward.  Now I can't even get Bob to leave his house without running into problems, let alone get him over to Ann.  Don't worry, we'll get these two crazy kids together yet.

EDIT: At the risk of making this the longest post ever, I'm going to go ahead with the edit I mentioned below.  Although the concept of relative motion is fundamental to the understanding of relativity, I haven't really delved too deeply into the matter in these posts.  Perhaps in the past I didn't fully appreciate what an important element it was.  Perhaps I took for granted that more people were familiar with the concept.  Either way, I think it's time to spare a few moments for a basic explanation of the concept.

In the comments below, Chanel was confused about how the house could be moving at 75% the speed of light in the scenario I laid out above.  I explained that it was a matter of relative motion.  We put some cars on a highway and I explained how their speeds calculated relative to one another.  If you're going 50 MPH and the car in front of you is traveling at 40 MPH, then from your perspective the car ahead of you is backing up towards you at 10 MPH.

Now, all this might seem needless confusing and a complete waste of time, but the fact of the matter is that the speed of nearly everything with one crucial exception is calculated from a reference point.  Generally we use the Earth itself as a reference point, and since most of our experience is confined to the surface of the Earth, this works out nicely and we never give it another thought.  When we're driving at 50 MPH in our car we never consider that this is 50 MPH relative to the Earth.  We just figure that's the speed we're moving.  But now let's say we stop at red light.  At that point, we figure we're standing still, and someone standing at the side of the road would agree.  They would look at our car and say it's stopped.  However, the Earth itself rotates at about 1,000 MPH give or take.  So, to someone out in space, they would say you're spinning at 1,000 MPH on the surface of the Earth.  The guy standing by the roadside thinks you're stopped because he's spinning at 1,000 MPH along with you.  Now, suppose there was a guy further out in space.  He would say, no, you're spinning at 1,000 miles an hour AND orbiting the sun at 67, 062 MPH.  Standing still indeed!  Now, suppose there was someone even further out in space.  He would say, no, again.  He would say you're spinning at 1,000 MPH, orbiting the sun at 67,062 MPH AND orbiting the galaxy at 447,000 MPH.  Finally, if you asked someone in another galaxy how fast you were moving, they would say you're spinning at 1,000 MPH, orbiting the sun at 67,062 MPH, orbiting the galaxy at 447,000 MPH and all the while you'd also be speeding away from them at 2,250,000 MPH (depending on which galaxy you talk to.)  So you see, the question of how fast you're going depends entirely on the reference point you're figuring your speed from.  In reference to the Earth, you're standing still.  In reference to the sun, you're spinning at 1,000 MPH and orbiting it at 67,062 MPH.  In reference to the center of the galaxy....you get the point.

Here's another example that doesn't involve a trip to deep space.  Let's say you're on a bus.  You're sitting in the back, and your friend is sitting up front.  You throw a tennis ball to your friend.  A guy sitting across the aisle clocks of the speed of this tennis ball, using a radar gun or something.  He gets a result of 5 MPH.  From his point of view, that's how fast the ball is moving.  Okay, now let's say you pass a guy standing on the street just as you throw the ball, and let's say the bus is going 50 MPH.  If he also had a radar gun and he had the slightest interest in knowing how fast the tennis ball was moving, he would get a result of 55MPH.  From his point of view, that's how fast the ball is moving, because the frame of reference that the ball is being throw at 5 MPH is itself moving at 50 MPH, so the results are compounded.

You'll remember though, that I said above that there was one crucial exception to all this.  That's the speed that light travels.  Light stands apart from all these interlocking frames of reference.  It travels at the same speed regardless of who is looking at it.  Let's say that instead of throwing a tennis ball, you shined a flash light up at your friend.  The guy across the aisle would clock the beam as traveling at the speed of light.  The guy standing on the street would also clock it as the speed of light, not the speed of light plus 50 MPH like the tennis ball.  The movement of the bus isn't a factor.  The light travels the same speed regardless.  Hell, even the guy in the other galaxy would agree on the speed.

Well, this created a problem.  Light is so much faster than the speeds we usually deal with (186, 282 miles per second) that it isn't real an everyday problem, but it was a problem nonetheless.  How could light cut through all these frames of relative motion and always end up being the same?  Something had to give.  Einstein came along and figured out that that something was space and time itself.  Why is that?  Well, that brings up back to the clock experiment I mentioned way up at the top of this post.

Fig. 1

The clock (fig. 1) operates by bouncing a beam of light between two mirrors.  The beam of light is represented by the yellow lines going up and down.  For the sake of argument, we'll say that the interval between each bounce is one second.  That would make the mirrors 186,282 miles apart.  That would be one huge friggin' clock, but again, for the sake of argument.  Every time the beam hits the mirror, it makes the clock tick one second.  Up, down, tick, tock.   It's a clock; it measures time; yawn...whatever.

Fig. 2

But, let's say you started to watch the clock move to the right.  Fig. 2 is suppose to represent the clock in motion, but you know how my Paint skills are.  The grey clocks are the same clock as it's moving, alright?  So, since the clock is moving, when the beam of light bounces from the bottom mirror to the top one, the top mirror is no longer in the same spot directly above where the bottom mirror was when the beam of light left it.  During the time the beam of light is traveling from bottom mirror to the top, the top has shifted to the right, because the clock is moving to the right.  From where you stand the light traveling in a zig-zag pattern of angles (fig. 2) which means it's traveling a farther distance.  It's not only covering the distance between the mirrors up and down.  It's also covering the distance that the clock has moved.  If we were dealing with tennis balls, there wouldn't be a problem.  We would just add the speed that the clock is moving to it's bouncing speed, and everything would fall nicely into place.  But light is different.  We still measure it traveling at the same speed.  So, since it's traveling a farther distance, but yet going the same speed, that means it takes longer to travel between the mirrors.  Since the clock is still ticking a second for each bounce, you begin to see it take longer and longer to tick a second as the clock moves faster and faster and the beam of light has to travel a farther distance and a more acute angle to keep up with it.  The clock begins to slowwww dowwwwnnn.  Tiiiiicccccckkkkk.....tooooooocccccckkkkk.  Gradually you notice that the time on the clock is falling behind the time on your watch.  Time is moving slower for the moving clock.

Now, suppose your friend was standing there with you.  They don't feel like just standing there watching the clock, so they run to catch up with it.  As they reach a speed where they're keeping a perfect pace with the clock, they look over and see fig.1 again, because relative to them, the clock is once again standing still.  So the years pass, and you stand there watching your friend and you grow old, but they stay young because time has slowed for them relative to you.

This "relative to you" is the crucial point.  If your friend looks back at you, it seems that you are receding from them.  If you're leaning against another one of these fancy clocks, they'll see the zig-zag effect on your clock and they'll think time is slowed for you.  You see, it's all relative.  So, who's growing the long white beard here?  Well, that brings you to the Twin Paradox.  The problem I propose above is a little different.  

Let's say your friend runs for a year.  They run at speed that will put them at a distance where the light will take 9 months to travel the distance between you after a year.  Then they stop and look back.  Now, you're both standing still relative to each other and time is ticking the same.  The light that reaches your friend has taken nine months to travel from you to the spot they're standing on, so they see you as you were nine months in the past.  But you can't look across that same distance and see your friend as they were nine months in the past, because they weren't stopped on that spot nine months ago.  They were still running with the clock.  This is where I'm stuck.

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The Power of a Word

I want to thank everyone for their comments on the last post.  I want to thank you all for your thoughtful and intelligent consideration of what I was saying, and for your own insightful input.  Mostly, I want to thank you all for not jumping ship on me.  I know how touchy a subject race can be.  I woke up today and realized that it was Martin Luther King jr. Day, and I thought, whoops.  Perhaps my timing wasn't the best, but I had no intention of coinciding with the holiday.  Quite honestly, I had forgotten all about it.  I meant no offense by what I said, and I sincerely hope none was taken.  I hope you understand; I couldn't very well argue for a word's right to remain in Huck Finn if I wasn't willing to write the word myself.  If I danced around it and only made oblique references to it, that would have undermined the point of the post, as well as compromised my own integrity.  However, I want to be perfectly clear that I absolutely do not advocate casually throwing racial epithets around.  I just don't believe a dead writer's words should be tampered with, just to make us all more comfortable with our own history.  I could only hope that no one tampers with my own words long after I'm gone, assuming anyone even remembers that I was alive.

I believe that if there's any hope of us all getting along and putting these painful chapters of the past behind us, then we all need to learn to calm down, relax, and speak openly about these things.  I think that acting like someone has violated some sort of restraining order if they get within fifty feet of the subject of race is counter-productive.  We need to put our cards on the table.  We need to embrace the awkwardness and push our way through, rather than running away.  I don't believe in sugar-coated social tranquillizers that put us all to sleep and allow us to go on living in denial.  I believe in the smoke alarm that wakes us up so that we can put out the fire before it's too late.  That alarm might be painful and disturbing to the ears, but it's far better than letting the house burn to the ground.  

People ofter say, "We'll look back on this and laugh someday."  I truly hope that day comes on the subject of race.  I hope the day will come when the lexicon of hatred will hold nothing but blank pages, and the words that sting and hurt today will finally become demystified and robbed of their power.  I hope the day will come where we'll be able to sit down and talk comfortably about the people we all once were, but are no longer. That day may be a long way off, but it'll never come until the tension in the air is diffused.  If we go on hiding everything behind painful smiles and we walk on egg-shells around each other, if we jump to conclusions and fly into anger at each other at the mere mention of a word, then we'll never be able to reveal the warmth of our true smiles and welcome each other in as part of the larger family of the human race.

Am I defending the word?  No.  I'm saying that the word gains power if you lock it away in a vault.  It becomes the "forbidden Word" with a capital "n", and it grows to mystical proportions.  It draws attention to itself in that void of silence where you censor it.  It becomes the undiagnosed cancer festering beneath the skin.  It becomes almost sacred and revered by virtue of being forbidden.  I say let it go.  Let them scream it from the rooftops until their voice is gone.  Don't give them the satisfaction.  Who cares?  It's just sad, angry men cursing the world.  They hold no real power over you.  They hold no power over any of us, beyond the power we give them.  Don't give them the power.  Let the vault stand empty and leave them with no weapons in their arsenal.  I hope we can forgive and be forgiven and all move on together.  There's a universe of incredible possibilities out there if we can set aside our petty differences between each other.

Nuclearheadache's Guide to Everyday Nutcases (part 1)

The DSM-IV does a fine job of describing genuine mental illnesses, but what about the rest of the lunatics out there?  You know who I'm talking about. You run across them whenever you step out your front door, these other people.  Every last one of them is completely, hopelessly out of their minds.  Next month will mark my 35th trip around the sun, and I've yet to meet one of these so-called "normal" people, not even in the mirror.  This handy guide is for and about everybody else out there.  Not those in the padded rooms, or the people that get a pass because everybody knows they're a little off.  I'm talking about people that are still "Okay" enough to hold down jobs.

          Miss Migraine

You probably know someone like this.  Most likely you call them a hypochondriac.  Ironically, it's just this sort of casual, amateur, exaggerated diagnosis that's at the root of Miss Migraine's problems.  You see, she isn't technically a hypochondriac, at least not in the clinical sense.  In fact, she isn't really anything in the clinical sense.  But if you spend any amount of time around her, you'll learn that she has a growing list of ailments and disorders longer than your arm.  All self diagnosed, of course.  Miss Migraine rarely takes any of these fantasy conditions seriously enough to actually go see a doctor about them.  She mostly just likes to throw dire medical terms around and complain to you about her problems on her lunch break.

Although it might all come across as an obvious ploy for sympathy, Miss Migraine's biggest problem is actually her own stunning lack of empathy.  The rest of the world's problems are flat and inconsequential to her.  It's all just a lot of whining and noise, lacking any real dimension, until something happens to her.  Her pain is always a much bigger deal than yours, and she has to describe it in the appropriate terms so that you'll understand that.  No one else has ever had the kind of problems she has.  Last week, when you briefly mentioned hurting your back, that just got on her nerves.  Suck it up, and get over it!  Then she goes and hurts her back.  Whoa!  Now this is serious!  This feels way worse than what you were talking about.  My God, she must have slipped a disc.  Oh no!

The classic example is the migraine headache.  For every one person who actually suffers from these debilitating afflictions, there are nine others who casually refer to every headache they have as a "migraine."  Not because they're experiencing any of the symptoms of the condition.  It's just because calling it a "headache" just isn't good enough.  They have to make sure you know that they have a worse headache than you could ever dream of having.  They have the worst headache in the history of headaches.  To that I say, "You've got a migraine headache, huh?  Well, I've got a nuclear headache.  Top that!!"

           The Cynic

This is a person who casts anything that anyone anywhere does in the worst possible light.  Their lack of faith in humanity is bottomless.  If you give five dollars to a homeless person, you're just trying to feel better about yourself, or even more likely, you're probably buying drugs off of them.  If you don't give five dollars to a homeless person, you're a greedy, heartless jerk.  If you try to do a good job, you're a suck up.  If you do a bad job, you just suck.  There's just no winning with The Cynic.  They're like a human slot machine that comes up "asshole" every time.

Of course, this rigged game is exactly what The Cynic is looking for.  It reinforces their negative image of people.  It's a vicious circle.  Their negative image makes them see the worst in people, and then what they see proves to them how horrible people are.  But why are they so determined to see people this way?  Where does this circle start?  Did a lifetime of disappointment and discouragement turn them into this bitter, hostile husk of a person?  What kind of satisfaction are they getting out of this?

Well, first there's the simple pleasure of sitting in judgment on people.  There's nothing like really digging around in someone else's faults.  It can provide hours of enjoyment and conversational subject matter.  The only thing better than slowing down to see a gruesome car accident is knowing that the guy who caused it was drunk and had a baby in the car at the time.  While we all may be guilty of being fascinated by this sort of thing from time to time, The Cynic thrives on it.  And their rigged outlook provides them with an endless source of material.  Secondly, it makes them feels better about themselves.  If you're a piece of garbage any way you slice it, then there's no chance of you looking like a better person than them.  Hell, "better person", no such thing.  People are hopelessly rotten, so it's pointless to even try to do anything good.  Get the idea?  It's hard to even talk about The Cynic without being dragged down into their bitterness yourself.    

To be continued...   

Looking for Love in the Uncanny Valley

The other day a co-worker of mine told me about a new pornographic sex-simulation game for the Xbox Kinect.  I suppose it was inevitable that something like that would happen, but they certainly didn't waste any time getting around to it.  I should point out that my source for this information is a known liar and idiot, but it's the principle and concept that I'm concerned with here anyway.  If they haven't actually made something like this yet, you know that they will sooner or later.  In an earlier post, when I complained that they needed to make more mature games for the new Kinect, this vision of a lonely middle-aged guy groping, gyrating, and smacking the thin air in front of his TV was definitely not what I had in mind.

Of course, this is hardly a new thing.  The Atari first took a stab at the idea with the pixelatedly pathetic Custer's Revenge.  As far as what sort of erotic satisfaction someone was supposed to get out of this, your guess is as good as mine.  Was it just good for a few juvenile laughs, or were people actually turned on by this?  At any rate, the genre persisted.  Computer system after system, console after console, there has always been an underground market of these games.  In Japan there is even apparently a whole cottage industry of pornographic anime games with interactive cartoon characters that can be abused in the satisfaction of all sorts of perversions and fetishes.

Setting aside issues of morality and taste that might be raised in objection to all this, there is a common failing to all these attempts.  It is this failing that keeps this latest Kinect example from being something that people might secretly find intriguing, and makes it instead something hopelessly, embarrassingly lame.  It's the missing element of physical contact.   Without this, what are you left with?  There's the visual stimulation, but good old fashioned regular pornography does a fine job of providing that.  There's the added element of interaction, but this comes at a noticeable price to the visual.  Sure, our lonely gamer can actually manipulate the subject of his amorous attention, but it ends up looking like he's just moving the wooden joints of a lifeless marionette.  Besides, this interaction is always facilitated via mouse or motion control.  At no point does the gamer have even the remotest sense that they're touching another human being.  So, allowing the gamer to thrust at the empty air, only to see these actions translated on the screen as relations with a virtual avatar, misses the point for miles upon miles.  The poor guy could turn off the TV, pump at the air, and use his imagination, if there was any hope of getting the slightest gratification out of it. 

There was a point, though, when that gratification seemed within our reach.  In the mid 90's virtual reality was the big fascination.  A fully immersive, artificial environment seemed right around the corner.  Sure all the current efforts involved  cumbersome gloves and helmets and they often caused seizures, eye-strain, and nausea, but it was just a matter of working out the bugs, right?  Sooner or later, we were going to find ourselves stepping out onto a virtual landscape that would feel just as real as the natural one.  Somewhere down the line, virtual reality went the way of flying cars and video phones.  It became yet another idea that seemed to serve no practical need.  The dream remains, simmering somewhere on the back burner of all our thoughts, but it's no longer something that we hope to find in the stores tomorrow afternoon.

But what was this dream?  What fulfillment were we hoping to find?  If you think about it, virtual reality was more about the physical sensation than the visual.  Sure, we wanted everything to look real, but this was a secondary consideration and one that we've come to satisfy with the refinement of graphic quality on the flat screen.  In all but one crucial respect, which we'll discuss shortly, the difference in the appearance of computer graphics and the real world is almost a negligible one at this point.  And yet, the dream remains unfulfilled, doesn't it?  It was really all about feeling like you were really in the virtual world, and somewhere deep down in a dark recess whether anyone wanted to admit it or not, a big driving motivation behind this desire was sex.  Sure, in polite company we'd all be in awe and amazement of how you could reach out and touch the leaves on the virtual trees, but after everyone had cleared out at midnight, you know what we would have all been up to. 

That missing variable of physical contact in the coital equation would have finally been provided for.  In fact, it might be for the best that this technology ended up on the shelf for the time being.  If we were to achieve a simulation of sex that was virtually indistinguishable from the real thing, who knows what kind of disaster that would spell for human relations.  Sex, just as physically satisfying as the genuine thing, would be ready at hand, even making the unintended pun here obsolete.  The pains we go through now in the pursuit of satisfaction are a huge and integral part of every facet of our existence.  It's no telling how far we'd let ourselves go.  Would we all degenerate into fat blobs of jaded satiation?  Would the human race burn itself out over this?  Will we ever be ready for this sort of thing?

And what of the "crucial respect" mentioned above?  In the world of computer programming and robotics there is a familiar term that defines the issue here, "The Uncanny Valley".  This is the idea that the closer simulations come to look and act and resemble real human beings, the more acutely we become aware of the fact that they are not human.  It's that strange, lifeless mask that we're all familiar with whenever we see a CGI replication of a person.  The lines of real and artificial converge, but never intersect on the horizon, at least not as far as the eye can see at the moment.  That could change in the future, further down the road.

In our virtual scenario, this issue goes beyond appearances and becomes a metaphysical one.  It can even serve as a mile marker of authenticity between the two realities.  At what point is the blurred line between masturbation and actual conjugal relations crossed?  At what point is the shame replaced with afterglow?  Ironically, I would have to pin-point that frontier at the point when the virtual object has reached the level of autonomy and A.I. self awareness to actually be capable of rejecting the advances of the user.  Unfortunately, that leaves our poor lonely gamer right back he started from in the real world.  This poor guy can't catch a break.

Saving Private Ryan: Images of War

Saving Private Ryan begins and ends with two long, extended battle sequences.  These scenes are shot hand-held with little dialogue and they have the feel of on-location documentary footage.  Because Private Ryan is a Spielberg film, and because it has that Spielberg style that feels good-hearted and hopeful even in the midst of war, I think people tend to forget how real and raw these scenes are.  One of the most brutal and violent depictions I've ever seen.  Kubrick may have had the more dark and calculating reputation, but shot for shot, there's really nothing in Full Metal Jacket that comes close to what you see here.

But it's not just violence for the sake of violence.  The two separate scenes and the feeling their images invoke serve as milestones that gauge the evolution worked in the audience's mind through-out the film.  The first scene depicts the D-Day landing at Normandy.  The shots are fast and low, and they give you an uncanny, unnerving feeling or being right there with the soldiers.  You feel you're experiencing the battle with them, and the one thought that goes through you mind, the same thought that must have gone through so many of their minds, is  simply that you don't want to die.  Beneath the withering fire of the German guns the whole point and purpose of the battle and all other considerations are pushed aside.  Life is torn to pieces all around you, and you just don't want to die.  Nothing else matters.  Then, the movie closes with another epic battle scene, as the characters fight to defend a bridge where the German army plans to cross.  Again, it's a harsh and violent scene, and again you feel like you're down in the middle of it with the characters, but yet somehow the fear of the opening scene is gone.  Death is still there at every turn, and a character is even show paralyzed into inaction by his own fear, but that feeling of stark and intense mortality that drives every other thought from the mind is gone, replaced by a feeling of nobler purpose.  It is the deceptively simple story that takes place between these two scenes that causes the change.

So what is this nobler purpose?  The movie barely touches on the political agendas and moral issues behind the war itself.  The subject of the holocaust is raised through a Jewish member of the squad that goes searching for Private Ryan, but this is more a matter of characterization than theme.  The German soldiers aren't cast as villains, and in fact, there is one scene where we can't help but feel sympathy for one of them.  So this "nobler purpose" isn't just a matter of good fighting in a righteous cause against evil.  The feeling is more like men put into an unfortunate situation where they're forced to kill one another.  In the heat of battle they're driven to a murderous rage because the enemy is trying to kill them even though they're also trying to kill the enemy in turn.  The absurdity of this is demonstrated clearly in one scene in particular.  The saying, "If God be for us, who could be against us?", is even raised in a conversation between the men, but it's clearly not where the movie's heart lies.  This is just the soldiers trying to make sense of the situation they find themselves in. 

No, the nobler purpose is to be found in their mission to find Ryan.  "This time, the mission is a man.", one of the soldiers observes.  It's the fact that even in the middle of a war, with men dying all around, one individual human life still has value.  It ultimately doesn't matter whether Ryan goes home and "invents a longer lasting light bulb."  What matters is that a human life was saved.  The importance of this comes to be something that goes beyond the "math" of the mission and even the senselessness of war itself.  One single man's life still has value.   

In the end, they stay to defend the bridge.  Not because the Germans are evil and have to be stopped.  They stay because Ryan doesn't want to abandon "the only brothers he has left."  They stay, because they stay together.  So when that final battle comes, it's no longer just a case of men thrown senselessly into the face of mortality.  It's men who have chosen to fight and even die to try to keep each other alive.  They've learned that isn't a question of nine men sacrificed to save one, or one sacrificed to save nine.  It's life that matters, regardless of the numbers.        

The Existence of God

Some people look at the stars and find God.  Some people find God in the first glimpse of the face of their newborn child.  Some people find God behind the bars of a prison cell, or at the end of their rope, or when they're scraping rock bottom looking for that last fix.  Some people find God at an alter call at a Sunday evening service where the drowsy light of the setting sun shines through.  Some people don't find God until they're drawing that last painful breath.  I found God in the periodic table of elements.  To each his own, I guess.

I grew up in a Christian home.  We went to church three times a week, twice on Sunday and once for Wednesday night prayer meeting.  We were there whenever the doors were open.  I also went to a private school for several years, also Christian.  I was knee deep in the religion.  It surrounded me on all sides.  Through-out my childhood I fluctuated between periods when I would become serious about being a "good Christian", and other periods when I couldn't care less and I just wanted to see what was happening with the TV shows I wasn't allowed to watch.  Regardless of these fluctuations, however, it never once even crossed my mind to question the truth of any of it.  God & the Devil, Heaven & Hell were as real and self-evident to me as my hand in front of my face.  I didn't even know that doubt was an option.

Then one day my brother, who's a few years older than me, came home from his college classes and mentioned that they had been learning about the notion that reality, as we know it, could be an illusion.  I remember his pointing to the light bulb hanging from the ceiling in the hallway and saying, "How do you really know that the light is on?  How do you know that you're not imagining it?  How do we know that we're both seeing the same thing?  How do you know you're not dreaming right now and none of this is real?"  I didn't know it at the time, but I wouldn't be exaggerating now if I told you that this simple moment on a rainy afternoon completely changed my life and who I was as a person, forever.  A tiny little crack had opened up in my view of the world, and I could see an incredible light coming from the other side.

I became fascinated by philosophy after that.  I started reading everything from Aristotle to Nietzsche.  I didn't understand half of it, and the half I thought I understood then, I didn't really understand either.  But the wheels were turning.  I started to keep a notebook of my ideas, a kind of fledgling precursor of this blog.  It wasn't long before the most obvious question of all occurred to me, "How do I know God is real?"  Now, it wasn't that I had been living under a rock and had never heard of atheism.  It was just that up to that point, I had never realized how someone could arrive at that conclusion.  Atheists were evil people, denying God so that they could live a life of sin and excess...or so I'd always heard.  Now I was seeing how reason, rather than sin, could lead you there as well.

Naturally, this didn't go over big at home or at school.  I started to rebel and get into trouble.   I started to ask questions.  Looking back on it now, my questions concerning Christianity and the existence of God could be broken down into three basic sub-categories: 1.) How do we know the Bible is actually the word of God?  2.) If everything that happens is God's will, then how does human free will fit into the equation?  3.) Did God decide and create the ideal of what is good, or does goodness exist independently of God and God is simply the ultimate realization of the ideal?  In other words, how could God be the highest measure of the standard and the creator of the standard as well?

Regarding the first question, the best they could do was quote me a bunch of Bible verses.  I had sense enough even then to know that you can't prove the authenticity of a document by quoting from a document itself.  I could write something on a napkin, and add a footnote that it was the word of God.  So that argument proved nothing to me.  Regarding the other two questions, oh we went round and round in circles on those.  I can't hardly blame them though.  Despite what I said in the opening paragraph, I'm still struggling with those myself.  Anyway, eventually they grew pretty tired of me at the school.  They put me on something they called "spiritual probation", a new type of thin ice that they basically invented just for me, and then they made it pretty clear that they didn't want me coming back to their school next year.  I was trying to open the minds around me in the same way mine had been opened.  Clearly some people were hostile to this.

In the midst of all this, everyday life went on.  In Chemistry class we were learning about the periodic table of elements.  We learned that all the chemical reactions between the elements were due to the fact that all the different elements are trying to reach a stability and stasis by having eight electrons in their outer shell.  Perhaps it was because 8 seemed such an arbitrary number.  If it had been an even 10, I might not have even taken note of it.  But as it was, it made me wonder.  I wasn't exactly seeing God in all this then, that came later.  At the time, I was just wondering.  Here was a rule that governed every physical reaction through-out the universe, but why?  Why did these atoms have such a thing for the number 8?  Who decided this?  The rule caused the reactions, but what caused the rule?

No doubt someone with far more scientific training that I could ever dream of acquiring  would be able to explain exactly why 8 is the magic number, but that would be missing the point.  Such an explanation would only remove the issue back by one degree.  My questioning had led me to that old conundrum that anyone who's ever had a conversation with a four year old child is familiar with.  For every "why?" there's another "why?" waiting on deck right behind it.  You can explain to the Nth degree how everything in the universe works, from the tiniest microbe to the collision of galaxies, but you'll never reach an ultimate explanation of why it just conveniently happens to be that way.  You can take the whole cosmic clock apart piece by piece and show exactly how it keeps time, but you still wouldn't be able explain why we're fortunate enough that this clock even exists instead of just a pile of cogs and gears.  In other words, how do you account for the principle of clockworkness itself?  Why not chaos?  Again, you could go deep, really dig down into the metaphysical foundation of everything and explain why the universe is governed by a system of consistent scientific laws, but you'll find another "why?" waiting right behind that one.  

Take evolution, for instance.  Now, to Christian people "evolution" is a dirty word, but ironically, I see this "God-principle" more at work there than anywhere else.  Just like with the periodic table, someone could explain to me in intricate and minute detail exactly how natural selection works.  I know enough about it myself to see that there's no mysterious magic behind it.  It makes, simple, natural, logical sense.  But aren't we lucky that it does?  There's even a built-in slight degree of imperfection in the universe that allows it to work.  This raises an issue for another day, but for now I'm just pointing out that there's even a perfect degree of imperfection to make it all work out, that slight little hiccup in the clock that keeps it running.

Now, you're thinking that all these issues have been raised before by the theory of Intelligent Design.  I would say, yes...but not quite...or maybe, up to a point.  You see, I'm not looking at all this and seeing the hand of a designer.  I'm thinking God is the design.  Once upon a time, people thought the clock itself was God.  Then someone came along and said, "No, God made the clock."  I'm saying that perhaps God is the principle of clockwork itself.  It's not the gears and springs and scientific laws; it's the thing that allows the gears and springs to work as a clock.  It's the reason a flower is beautiful, that falls as a shadow behind any other reason you might give.  It's not how we came to be here to see the flower; it's why.  It's...well, quite honestly, it's beyond my power to explain.  In fact, it's the very nature of it to reside beyond explanation.  If you try to explain God, you find that it slips another degree away, forever just beyond your grasp.

There might be some fall-out and controversy over this, or it might be met with bland, unimpressed indifference.  I don't know.  I wish I could say I was up to that task of really putting this into words.  I've heard before that writers should never whine about their own inadequacies of expression in their writing.  They should either put up or shut up.  Well, I've done my best at putting up.  I wish I could say that all this helps me sleep at night, and that I'm no longer confused and plagued with doubts.  But I am, and probably always will be.  That light bulb in the hallway changed me in ways that can't be unchanged, even if I wanted to.   All I have to offer is a feeling that I have, a sense and a faith that the ship of space and time is being guided along on a steady course, holding the whole crazy universal carnival together.