Events, Stories, Life

Jennifer Balderama is blogging about finding her father floating face down while swimming in Hawaii. She leaves us hanging about how he’s doing because no one at that point knew what was going on with him.

She’s a terrific writer. She tells the story well. It makes you wonder anew at the fact that life comes in stories.

[Jennifer, I know it’s not just a story to you. I’m sure everyone who reads your blog wishes you and your dad the best.]

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Meaning Index

Due to the events of the past few months, the meaning of the universe has been downgraded to 39.

– The Management

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E-Friends Redux

Gary Turner has a new suggestion for what we call people that we are friends with through email. Rather than “e-pals,” as suggested by Bethann, Gary would have us use:

equaintances
No reason we can’t use both as estrangers become equaintances, then epals, and finally, as efamiliarity breeds econtempt, e-nemies.

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Gonzo Self-Promotion

Mike Sanders has raised a question at GonzoEngaged (and we didn’t even know Gonzo was going steady!):

I was wondering how integral self-promotion is to Gonzo Marketing? It seems that the most succesful web personalities like Rageboy, Dave Winer and Andrew Sullivan do a decent amount of it. Is this the discovery of voice or some other essential Gonzo theme?

In the ironic spirit of self-promotion, and assuming that cross-blogging is frowned upon, I won’t reproduce here my response there (which is basically that, no, you can be gonzoidally engaged without taking yourself as your subject).
Meanwhile, I am so stricken by a neurotic, self-involved self-effacement that only in this meta-meta-meta guise can I bring myself to note in public that the first early readers’ comments (= “blurbs”) have started coming in for my book. I should really get over getting over myself and just print them here, don’t you think? Does someone have the name of a therapist with some spare cycles and a flair for the absurd?

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Ev on Weblog Stats

Ev responds to our bloggerino about weblog statistics it’d be interesting to know:

…as far as I know, that data has not been collected. And, I agree, it would certainly be interesting. An easy way to derive a lot of it would be from the Blogger database — and/or the LiveJournal database. These are probably the richest and easiest-to-crunch sources of weblogging data, as they have all the data for all their users in one place. (Though their extrapolation to the rest of the blogging world would be up for debate, it’d be a good place to start.) (I’m not sure about editthispage and weblogs.com-hosted sites, because I don’t know how exactly that data is stored or how much of it there is.) I would love to have those numbers for my purposes and be glad to share them if I did. My only problem is I don’t have time to do all the analysis – or the money to pay someone to do it. At least not right now. Hopefully, soon. Alternatively, I would be open to giving access to someone who wanted to do the crunching for non-commercial purposes – perhaps for a student project or someone just for fun. Feel free to put that word out.

Consider it put – although putting out a word in this obscure weblog may be more like putting out a fire.

But here’s the big news: Ev expects to have money soon! Perhaps he has insider information that the world is about to become a just and fair place…

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Google the Good, Part Whatever

John Loverso has found an undocumented command that lets us ego search UseNet while excluding our own messages:

loverso -author:loverso

Another correspondent on the mailing list where John produced this info, Anton Sherwood, refined it so that you don’t exclude messages from other people named “Loverso”:

loverso -author:[email protected]

Note to the Dumb: This works with names other than Loverso.

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A Christmas for Everyone

Christmas
is too cool a holiday to confine it to Christians. We ought to reformulate it as a secular two-day holiday, Dec. 24-25. On the 24th, we’d
all decorate our homes with lights, reflect on peace, get together with the family, exchange presents, drink
eggnog, kiss strangers under mistletoe, etc.,
just because those are fun things to do near the Solstice. It’d have nothing to do with Jesus, mangers or myrhhhhh. Then, on the 25th, the Christians could
celebrate Christ’s birth by going to church,
praying, and engaging in activities more spiritual than whining about misfired gifts before heading out to an afternoon movie. The rest of us would have a second day off.

So, I guess my new party platform is: “Let’s get the
Christ out of Christmas.” In fact, let’s call the
new two day federal holiday “Mas.” Got the Spanish
connection and everything.

---

George Lyon responds:

.. I urge you to take heart as I did from
a recent (yesterday or the day before I think) feature on Marketplace
(the NPR business show). It casually stated
that many more Japanese celebrate Christmas than are Christian and moved
on to the main point which is that many more Japanese than should (my
spin) eat Kentucky Fried Chicken on Christmas because they believe that
is what Americans do…

It’s like seeing your own unconscious habits reflected in your children’s behavior. Embarrassing.

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Ideas about the Universe I’ll Die Not
Understanding (Or: Why a Little Knowledge Is a Stupid Thing)

I’ve read a lot of books that try to explain
modern physics to laypeople (i.e., morons like me who can’t
do the math). As a result, I am in the position of a
goldfish stumped by the concept
of glass.
Here are some of the questions I will never
understand. I mean never. So please don’t write to
me thinking that with one more explanation I’ll
finally get it. I won’t. I started down this path
when I was about 13 by reading a book Einstein wrote
for laypeople. (Anyone know the book I have in mind?
I can’t find it at Amazon.) As with every book I’ve
read, I understood it paragraph by paragraph and
came out with a set of concepts I could mouth but
not really make sense of. So, unless you think you
can do better than Einstein, don’t try. (Nah, I know
this won’t stop you.)
And, yes, I do know that the big
misunderstandings I’m about to reveal betray my
ignorance. No need to remind me of that. This is all
part of the process of preemptive self-embarrassment
that is the aim of my working life and, indeed, of most of my
waking life.
Here goes:
1. We all know that if we were to send a twin
into space in a space ship, less time would have
passed for her than for her twin on earth; if she
traveled sufficiently close to the speed of light,
she would find that her twin had aged many years
more than she had. But, since Einsteinian space has
no privileged frame of reference, we could just as
well describe the event as the twin in the space
ship staying still while the earth (and the rest of
the universe) zoomed out from under her. Under this
description, the twin in the space ship should age
more. Wazzup?
2. Is Indeterminacy an ontological or
epistemological statement? Or is it really not a problem with observation
but a problem with thinking that there are such
things as particular moments of time? That is, an
observation has to be an observation of something at
a particular moment. But if there is no quantum of
time, no atom of time, then indeterminacy isn’t
caused by observation but by our assumption that
there are moments. For example, if you ask me the exact position of a car on the highway between any two seconds, the answer will be a short strretch of road with the car somewhere in between. As you decrease the specified amount of time, the length of road gets shorter by the answer is still a mushy “Somewhere between A and B.” We never get to a precise answer unless we can name not a stretch of time but a precise moment. No moments, no precision. Discuss amongst yourselves.
[Note: A famous astrophysicist at MIT tells me that
this idea is crap. Obviously, he just can’t keep up
with my breathtaking insights.]
3. Do strings actually have shape? Or is that
just a convenient way to describe them because it
allows us to talk in terms of vibrations? Do they
actually vibrate or is that merely a way of talking
about properties describable only in mathematics?
Please confine yourself to a Yes or No. Thank you.
4. If the light is on in your closet and the door is closed, when you turn off the light the closet gets dark because the light inside
bounces around until it finds the crack and
“escapes.” That’s my understanding, anyway. So, if I
had a dark room with no openings, would it stay lit?
Further, if I’m in the darkened closet with the slit
at the bottom, why doesn’t an equal amount of light
come bouncing in as comes bouncing out?

5. Won’t someone please feed Schroedinger’s cat?

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Right on, Ev!

Hackers are jerks. I just wanted to go on record with that.

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Helpful Forums

I, along with 250,000 other people, subscribe to Lockergnome, a daily email newsletter, because it’s got tons of Windows tips and pointers to useful downloads. Also, the author, Chris Pirillo, has more personality than he knows what to do with – a lot of groansome puns balanced by a wide range of enthusiasms. Lockergnome also has its geeky side, and its newsgroups are a great resource if you have questions about XP, Linux, Mac, games and two dozen other topics. (You’re also allowed to participate if you actually have answers, or so I’m told.) Sure, there are lots of other forums, including UseNet (which should be experiencing a spike in usage now that Google has enabled us to find stuff there again), but I’ve found the Lockergnome XP forum in particular to be responsive, non-spammed, and free of Only-A-Moron-Would-Ask-Such-a-Dumb-Question replies.

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