and one fine morning…
Archive for September, 2008
…and we filled our arms, carried all we could
Sep 28th
Sigur Ros and Parachutes played at Red Rocks last night. I really don’t know if I have the right words for the show.
I spent the day studying Analysis at a shop in the Highlands, and buried my mind in the pure logic of math. A weak breakfast and two cups of coffee spread me pretty thinly over reality, and after a nap from 4-5 I woke up feeling lucid, but still thinned to patina-consciousness. This was a good setup for the show.
It was about 65°F out, and mildly windy at Red Rocks. Our general admission seats turned into row 16. I am not sure how much more there is to say that could do the show justice. Seeing Sigur Ros play in the wind, with smoke billowing around them, was entrancing. I haven’t been to a show before where all I wanted to do was stand still, and stare, taking in all I could.
Some bands project energy to the crowd, and receive energy from the crowd; they use an energetic correspondence to create a concert. I think last night, both bands just played, and the crowd watched (nearly) silently. It doesn’t take that much to get a 10,000 people cheering, but it takes a lot to get 10,000 people completely silent—I could hear people coughing from across Red Rocks in between songs in the beginning.
Sigur Ros and Parachutes were just making music, and taking in the night, and we were just there to watch and be included, while they did something deeply personal.
Completely unrelated, here is an interesting blog, where a married couple chose to subject themselves to a $1.00 per day diet, on which the world’s poor are forced to live. Check it out: http://onedollardietproject.wordpress.com/
við spilum endalaust
Sep 24th
Purge[mind[t],{t,a while back, now}]
Carlin moved to SF with Barry and Helen. Ollie arrived tonight. They are all living together, and I am very excited for them. I think it will continue to be positive for all involved.
Among other wonderful reinterpretations in Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl turns the concept of transitoriness on its head. Usually, we think of things that have passed as transitory; after all, things that have passed are no longer with us. Turning this on its head, Frankl writes, “[T]he only really transitory aspects of life are the potentialities; but as soon as they are actualized, they are rendered realities at that very moment; they are saved and delivered into the past, wherein they are preserved and rescued from transitoriness. For, in the past, nothing is irretrievably lost but everything irrevocably stored.”
Ok, let’s take that and spilum. Given that at any moment, there are a (countably*) infinite number of possibilities (Frankl calls them potentialities) and that whatever entropic process pushes time forward has the capacity to select one of those possibilities as what actually happened, we conclude that human’s** free will*** has the property of being scribe/selector of which potentiality becomes past reality. Id est: choose your own adventure. “On Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed.” Except that on Rosh Hashanah in this case, there’s too much written, so free will lets us edit the text up until the Yom Kippresent Moment. And in implementation, we use the continuous-time version of the model instead of the discretization—we don’t need the error anyway. </garbage>
Here is maybe not some garbage though. ∃ a huge number of potentialities
⇒ one may exert a large amount of influence over what entropy makes permanent when it records/makes irrevocable the past
⇒ one should attempt to maximize the value of what one allows to be made irrevocable
⇒ contrive a plan to Live Now that solves the maximization problem.
School is going well. Sometimes I think that classes and teaching really get in the way of learning. That, however, has a bit to do with who is lecturing that day. I have continued to heed BE’s advice and have enrolled in a macro econ class. It’s fun because the other students in the class don’t understand that math, and I don’t understand the econ. However, I think the econ is made clearer and more intuitive when the math is already intuitive. I regret (for the sake of the other students) that sometimes the econ intuition may not help with the math intuition, but who knows? I haven’t been there, so I don’t really know.
I have been riding my bike a lot, and recently rode my first century. It took me (and my aunt) 6 hours and 25 mins, which is fine with me, since I just wanted to finish. I got going 52 mph down a hill outside Boulder, which was really exhilarating. Finished with a good attitude despite a flat at mile 83 that really messed with my head a little.
It’s too late now, and I need to TeX up analysis notes in the morning. More ideas than usual lately, but sometimes a little trouble getting them all down. Here are my current goals, with which I have been having a fair amount of success over the past couple months:
- Write every day.
- Eat breakfast every day.
- Emulate Gadi’s confidence.
Interesting articles: Cities rethinking ’50s-era parking standards and What makes people vote Republican?
Over and Out. Here is a picture of Frankl. I highly recommend Man’s Search for Meaning, because it is very good, and only 160 pages too!
*math joke only. No intended meaning.
**gender-neutral form of man’s? ⇒ No the apostrophe isn’t incorrect.
***for our gedanken, we assume ∃ free will.