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The Dishwasher's Tears

~ how do we reconcile the beauty with the horror?

The Dishwasher's Tears

Monthly Archives: January 2012

Going Wrong

31 Tuesday Jan 2012

Posted by tearfuldishwasher in Uncategorized

≈ 16 Comments

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With no right to complain, I yet mewl and fuss.

I am sore put out.

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Worst is, I’ve got nary to blame excepting myself.

I should kick my own ass, is what.

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Last week in a nearby town we had a cop shot by another cop, they was trying to arrest him for banging an underage police explorer. I’m in two trials with completely unexplainable homicides where there is only going to be either a bad ending or a worse one. I read some shit in the LA times about a teacher tying up kids and putting roaches on them before making them do something so depraved and sickening that I won’t say what, and this was while the kids were in school. All around me these close friends are losing their twenty year marriages to infidelity.

And all I really give a shit about is my own unhappiness.

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Do you sometimes wish you could just shed your whole being like the dead skin of a snake?

Well, who doesn’t wish that from time to time?

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This seems to help some, though. I love me some Cormac McCarthy. And I like that biblioklept blog some, too. You might check it out if you’ve a mind to.

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In honor of my bad mood, here is some Gilbert for you. Although it is really just for me.

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GOING WRONG

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The fish are dreadful. They are brought up
the mountain in the dawn most days, beautiful
and alien and cold from night under the sea,
the grand rooms fading from their flat eyes.
Soft machinery of the dark, the man thinks,
washing them. “What can you know of my machinery!”
demands the Lord. Sure, the man says quietly
and cuts into them, laying back the dozen struts,
getting to the muck of something terrible.
The Lord insists: “You are the one who chooses
to live this way. I build cities where things
are human. I make Tuscany and you go to live
with rock and silence.” The man washes away
the blood and arranges the fish on a big plate.
Starts the onions in the hot olive oil and puts
in peppers. “You have lived all year without women.”
He takes out everything and puts in the fish.
“No one knows where you are. People forget you.
You are vain and stubborn.” The man slices
tomatoes and lemons. Takes out the fish
and scrambles eggs. I am not stubborn, he thinks,
laying all of it on the table in the courtyard
full of early sun, shadows of swallows flying
on the food. Not stubborn, just greedy.

 

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Namaste, begrudgingly.

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Jesus Walked On The Water

29 Sunday Jan 2012

Posted by tearfuldishwasher in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

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                                              -Directed by Quentin Tarentino.

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It’s Sunday.

All about dog walking, house cleaning, tending to loved ones, cooking, eating, and drinking.

See you on the other side of the week.

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Namaste.

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Crossing The Fjord

28 Saturday Jan 2012

Posted by tearfuldishwasher in Uncategorized

≈ 21 Comments

 

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One of the things you do before a big trial is sit with the prosecutor and the potential witnesses and go over testimony and reports and evidence to make reasonably certain that there aren’t going to be any big surprises on the stand. A couple of days ago I sat with this old cowboy.

He come in with his son. They looked as out of place as I’m sure they felt, standing in our sleek gray conference room in their plaid work shirts, jeans and worn boots, their stained felt resistol hats in their hard, knobby hands. The boy was over six foot and baby-faced, his head lowered, his eyes not missing a thing. He stayed mostly silent, but when he did speak it was to the point and the point was sharp.

The old man was as lost as I’ve ever seen a human being. Lost, but desperate to gain his bearings back and to buck up under it. His hands shook violently with palsey and his red-rimmed eyes rattled around the room like mice looking for a way out of a cage. When his eyes lit on one of the detectives who’d been out at the scene, he  hugged him tight, tears welling up and spilling over. He clapped him on the shoulder again and again, and turned to the prosecutor, telling him, “This here is a good man. A good man. You ought to know what kind of a man you have here, and he’s a good one.”

The detective turned away, wiping at his eyes.

Anyways, we sat down and for the next three or four hours we went through the photographs in evidence. We had gone through beforehand and took out all the bad ones so he wouldn’t have to see them, but there was not much use in that. The events of that day were burned into him in the way that those things get burned in, and as soon as he saw the first picture he was right back there. He pointed a gnarled finger at the computer screen and started pointing out details, and telling his story.

What was good was everyone in that room knew the deal and we let him go. You do more harm than good trying to keep them on point when they’re churned up like that. When they’re back in that awful place you gotta just let it spill out, and you go ahead and pick out what it is you were looking for in all that. You don’t try to corral him none, you just give him his head and hang on. There was a lady from victim witness in there, running out and coming back with water for the old man, looking over at the boy to see did he need anything, and whenever our eyes met she bit her lip and looked over at the ceiling behind my shoulder.

Sometimes I get so focused on the dead that I lose sight of how much the living suffer from these crimes. You ought to have seen how that boy looked after his old man. It broke my heart all over again. And you knew talking to everyone in the aftermath of what had happened that everybody in that family was just good folks. Just real good people who got visited by something evil. Some of them it killed and some of them it just left wishing they was dead.

Anyhoo.

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It seems lately that everywhere I look I am confronted with the fragile, provisional nature of the structures we erect to protect ourselves and to give our lives meaning.

We are like children engrossed in our sand castles, ignorant of the hunger and ferocity of the sea for what we’ve built.

We move toward a more disordered state.

 

Entropy increases.

 

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Last night we had a fancy dinner out with my mom and step-dad. Nice, semi-pretentious italian joint. They had a price fixe meal where you got an appetizer, a main course, and dessert for thirty bucks.

It was really nice to sit and listen to everyone, share a couple of bottles of great wine, taste each other’s food, and be together in a fancy place with folks in starched and pressed white shirts taking care of us, pouring our wine, bringing us more spoons, making sure we were contented.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating:

This is why we are alive.

Go you ahead and eat too much good food in the company of good people. Have you that second bottle of red. Have that white truffle oil gelato.

And don’t be shy with your hugs and kisses. With your small kindnesses and large.

 

We are all of us going to be rolled over by the big machine. It’s a slaughterhouse out there.

 

Let’s be good to each other and ourselves while we’ve got the wherewithal to do it.

 

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Namaste.

 

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Hydrothermal origin of life

21 Saturday Jan 2012

Posted by tearfuldishwasher in Uncategorized

≈ 10 Comments

 

So, I wouldn’t even read this if I were you.

You’ve been warned.

 

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I guess I’m a little late to the hydrothermal-vent-as-likely-origination-point-of-life-on-earth party, but I’m really intrigued with it, and it feels like an essential piece of the grand structure of the understanding everything puzzle has fallen into place for me.

In an earlier post I looked at how scientists have wound the clock back on a universal, galactic scale and worked out the Big-bang theory of the origination of the universe. In a similar way, biologists have wound back the clock on a planetary scale and worked out a theory for the origin of life and the subsequent explosion of biodiversity driven by a mostly stable but highly variable genetic code held in DNA and given an over-arching structure by Darwin’s theory of evolution.

But both theories, the big-bang on a cosmic scale, and the origin of life on our more intimate planetary scale, have a remaining hard little nugget of a question mark deep in the creamy dark center of them. In the big-bang the question is, of course, what caused the incredibly dense, incredibly smooth, hard ball of all future matter and energy that would make up the universe to form in the first place, and what predated that, and why is there something rather than nothing at all?

In biology, we’ve got a similar gap between the very simplest form of life and the most complex of organic molecules, with a kind of hazy “well, given enough time, sufficient energy in the form of electricity, heat, radiation, etc” eventually something happened and these complex organic molecules kind of evolved into prokaryotic cells, which then, given enough time, suddenly evolved into eukaryotic cells, which pretty much sent us off to the races.

I remember seeing some movie in seventh grade or something, about the experiment where the guy put a bunch of the chemicals present in early earth in a glass beaker and added heat and electricity and created amino acids, and the theory was that life probably originated in a puddle on the surface of the hot, still largely volcanic, pre-atmosphere early earth.

But there were some problems with the theory, mainly that conditions in the imagined scenario were not really lining up with what we were learning about the early earth.

It wasn’t until the deep submersible subs like ALVIN were developed that marine biologists were able to observe conditions at the deep sea hydrothermal vents, and they were blown away by what they found there. You’re talking about two miles deep, bottom of the ocean, incredible pressures, no sunlight for miles, deeply cold conditions. We basically thought then of the oceans as largely empty of life, similar to deep space. Lots of life up near the surface, and close to land, but more like an empty desert in the pelagic depths. We didn’t think the conditions were suitable for life, other than a few odd exceptions, monsters and deep-sea creatures that seemed more like myths than anything real.

But when they get down there, they see all this life.

Tube worms three meters in length, their feet in the hydrothermal vents, their mouths out in the cold dark waters, feeding off of these vents spewing toxic metals and chemicals up from the bowels of the earth and into the bottom of the sea. Shrimps and octopi, crabs, eels, all manner of blind and impossible life.

The really interesting thing to me is that these hydrothermal vents have maintained a steady environmental state for billions of years. It’s not like top-side, where climate changes, the continents drift and collide, and asteroids bombard and wipe out whole planetary lifecycles.

It’s really, really stable.

I mean, the vents themselves don’t last more than ten or twenty years at a time, we think. But they pop up reliably all along a forty-six thousand mile long chain of volcanic deepsea ranges and have been there since the oceans formed.

A long, long time.

Which means that we still have this little engine chugging along that is probably just like what it was like a million million million years ago. Before the dinosaurs, before everything else.

And it’s still here. Still doing its thing.

Another thing I really like about this fact is when I think about all we’re doing to destroy this place and all life on it. We can kill off everything on the surface, wipe out everything we can get our hands on, cover the planet with pollution and shit, strip away the ozone layer, block the sun with the cloudcover of nuclear winter, turn the earth into a cinder, but unless we can actually strip the oceans away, we’ll still have this same engine of life chugging away, living in the deepest, coldest, most isolated part of the planet, living off of toxic chemicals and the energy of the planet’s core, and throwing off new life that can repopulate the planet a hundred million years after we’re all gone.

 

I really, really like that.

 

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You begin to get this feeling for a universe that is truly universal. The conditions everywhere are roughly the same. Same organic building blocks that arose out of the same building blocks throughout the cosmos. Everywhere there are stars. Everywhere. And we’re learning that planets are yet more numerous than stars. And some of these planets are small, rocky places just the right distance from their sun to be warm enough to support life, right in the goldilocks zone. And everywhere these chemical reactions churning. Everywhere billions of years of time accumulating drip by drip. Everywhere carbon, everywhere the same kinds of tools and conditions.

The universe comes into being spontaneously. As does life itself. And life love complexity. Life asserts itself. Life worms its way into every possible nook and cranny. It experiments with every possible way of being. It rolls the genetic dice again and again and again and again, never resting, never stopping.

Mind boggling waste. Massive failure rate. Endless successes that eventually die out or get wiped out or wipe themselves out. But always another coming to take the stage. And look just on this one tiny planet how smart we’re getting. How many brains there are, not just in humans, but all over the place. You can’t swing a dead cat around here without hitting a goddamn brain. Lots and lots of experiments in consciousness. Numberless tries at it.

And look at us, experiment number two billion three hundred eighty seven million and twelve.

Look at what we’ve done.

 

We’ve figured all this shit out. The origin of the universe, the laws of physics, the nuts and bolts of how life works.

Yeah, we’re not very good at it yet. We’re a provisional kind of consciousness still. We don’t know how to live life well, we don’t know what to do with our great good gift. We’re consciousness 1.0.

 

Don’t worry, there are lots better versions coming down the pike.

 

Just wait.

 

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Anyway, all this shit makes me happy to think about.

 

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Namaste.

 

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African Alchemy On Blindness

21 Saturday Jan 2012

Posted by tearfuldishwasher in Uncategorized

≈ 9 Comments

Go here and read this, you’ll like it, I promise.

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Namaste

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Distant Time and a hint of the multiverse

15 Sunday Jan 2012

Posted by tearfuldishwasher in Uncategorized

≈ 8 Comments

Distant Time and a hint of the multiverse

 

The following is a transcript of Sean Carroll’s talk at TED Caltech. I watched the talk and was completely blown away by his grasp of the fundamentals and his insight into the implications for all of us. He gives the best overall explanation of what reality is that I’ve ever heard. I hope you will watch the video or read the transcript.

Tearful Dishwasher

 

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The universe is really big. We live in a galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy. There are about a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. And if you take a camera and you point it at a random part of the sky, and you just keep the shutter open, as long as your camera is attached to the Hubble Space Telescope, it will see something like this:

Every one of these little blobs is a galaxy roughly the size of our Milky Way — a hundred billion stars in each of those blobs. There are approximately a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. 100 billion is the only number you need to know. The age of the universe, between now and the Big Bang, is a hundred billion in dog years. Which tells you something about our place in the universe.

One thing you can do with a picture like this is simply admire it. It’s extremely beautiful. I’ve often wondered, what is the evolutionary pressure that made our ancestors in the Veldt adapt and evolve to really enjoy pictures of galaxies when they didn’t have any. But we would also like to understand it.

As a cosmologist, I want to ask, why is the universe like this? One big clue we have is that the universe is changing with time. If you looked at one of these galaxies and measured its velocity, it would be moving away from you. And if you look at a galaxy even farther away, it would be moving away faster. So we say the universe is expanding. What that means, of course, is that, in the past, things were closer together. In the past, the universe was more dense, and it was also hotter. If you squeeze things together, the temperature goes up. That kind of makes sense to us. The thing that doesn’t make sense to us as much is that the universe, at early times, near the Big Bang, was also very, very smooth. You might think that that’s not a surprise. The air in this room is very smooth. You might say, “Well, maybe things just smoothed themselves out.” But the conditions near the Big Bang are very, very different than the conditions of the air in this room. In particular, things were a lot denser. The gravitational pull of things was a lot stronger near the Big Bang. What you have to think about is we have a universe with a hundred billion galaxies, a hundred billion stars each. At early times, those hundred billion galaxies were squeezed into a region about as big as a golfball — literally — at early times. And you have to imagine doing that squeezing without any imperfections, without any little spots where there were a few more atoms than somewhere else. Because if there had been, they would have collapsed under the gravitational pull into a huge black hole. Keeping the universe very, very smooth at early times is not easy; it’s a delicate arrangement. It’s a clue that the early universe is not chosen randomly. There is something that made it that way. We would like to know what.

So part of our understanding of this was given to us by Ludwig Boltzmann, an Austrian physicist in the 19th century. And Boltzmann’s contribution was that he helped us understand entropy. You’ve heard of entropy. It’s the randomness, the disorder, the chaoticness of some systems. Boltzmann gave us a formula — engraved on his tombstone now — that really quantifies what entropy is. And it’s basically just saying that entropy is the number of ways we can rearrange the constituents of a system so that you don’t notice, so that macroscopically it looks the same.

If you have the air in this room, you don’t notice each individual atom. A low entropy configuration is one in which there’s only a few arrangements that look that way. A high entropy arrangement is one that there are many arrangements that look that way. This is a crucially important insight because it helps us explain the second law of thermodynamics — the law that says that entropy increases in the universe, or in some isolated bit of the universe. The reason why entropy increases is simply because there are many more ways to be high entropy than to be low entropy. That’s a wonderful insight, but it leaves something out. This insight that entropy increases, by the way, is what’s behind what we call the arrow of time, the difference between the past and the future. Every difference that there is between the past and the future is because entropy is increasing — the fact that you can remember the past, but not the future. The fact that you are born, and then you live, and then you die, always in that order, that’s because entropy is increasing. Boltzmann explained that if you start with low entropy, it’s very natural for it to increase because there’s more ways to be high entropy.

What he didn’t explain was why the entropy was ever low in the first place. The fact that the entropy of the universe was low was a reflection of the fact that the early universe was very, very smooth. We’d like to understand that. That’s our job as cosmologists. Unfortunately, it’s actually not a problem that we’ve been giving enough attention to. It’s not one of the first things people would say, if you asked a modern cosmologist, “What are the problems we’re trying to address?”

One of the people who did understand that this was a problem was Richard Feynman. 50 years ago, he gave a series of a bunch of different lectures. In every one of these books, every one of these sets of lectures, he emphasized this puzzle:

Why did the early universe have such a small entropy?

So he says, “For some reason, the universe, at one time, had a very low entropy for its energy content, and since then the entropy has increased. The arrow of time cannot be completely understood until the mystery of the beginnings of the history of the universe are reduced still further from speculation to understanding.”

So that’s our job. We want to know — this is 50 years ago, “Surely,” you’re thinking, “we’ve figured it out by now.” It’s not true that we’ve figured it out by now. The reason the problem has gotten worse, rather than better, is because in 1998 we learned something crucial about the universe that we didn’t know before. We learned that it’s accelerating. The universe is not only expanding. If you look at the galaxy, it’s moving away. If you come back a billion years later and look at it again, it will be moving away faster.

Unlike the low entropy of the early universe, even though we don’t know the answer for this, we at least have a good theory that can explain it, if that theory is right, and that’s the theory of dark energy. It’s just the idea that empty space itself has energy. In every little cubic centimeter of space, whether or not there’s stuff, whether or not there’s particles, matter, radiation or whatever, there’s still energy, even in the space itself.

And this energy, according to Einstein, exerts a push on the universe. It is a perpetual impulse that pushes galaxies apart from each other. Because dark energy, unlike matter or radiation, does not dilute away as the universe expands. The amount of energy in each cubic centimeter remains the same, even as the universe gets bigger and bigger.

This has crucial implications for what the universe is going to do in the future. For one thing, the universe will expand forever.

Back when I was your age, we didn’t know what the universe was going to do. Some people thought that the universe would recollapse in the future. Einstein was fond of this idea. But if there’s dark energy, and the dark energy does not go away, the universe is just going to keep expanding forever and ever and ever. 14 billion years in the past, but an infinite number of years into the future.

Meanwhile, for all intents and purposes, space looks finite to us. Space may be finite or infinite, but because the universe is accelerating, there are parts of it we cannot see and never will see.

There’s a finite region of space that we have access to, surrounded by a horizon. So even though time goes on forever, space is limited to us.

Finally, empty space has a temperature. In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking told us that a black hole, even though you think it’s black, it actually emits radiation when you take into account quantum mechanics. The curvature of space-time around the black hole brings to life the quantum mechanical fluctuation, and the black hole radiates. A precisely similar calculation by Hawking and Gary Gibbons showed that if you have dark energy in empty space, then the whole universe radiates.

The energy of empty space brings to life quantum fluctuations.

And so even though the universe will last forever, and ordinary matter and radiation will dilute away, there will always be some radiation, some thermal fluctuations, even in empty space. So what this means is that the universe is like a box of gas that lasts forever.

Well what is the implication of that? That implication was studied by Boltzmann back in the 19th century. He said, well, entropy increases because there are many, many more ways for the universe to be high entropy, rather than low entropy. But that’s a probabilistic statement. It will probably increase, and the probability is enormously huge. It’s not something you have to worry about — the air in this room all gathering over one part of the room and suffocating us. It’s very, very unlikely. Except if they locked the doors and kept us here literally forever, that would happen.

Everything that is allowed, every configuration that is allowed to be obtained by the molecules in this room, would eventually be obtained. So Boltzmann says, look, you could start with a universe that was in thermal equilibrium. He didn’t know about the Big Bang. He didn’t know about the expansion of the universe. He thought that space and time were explained by Isaac Newton — they were absolute; they just stuck there forever. So his idea of a natural universe was one in which the air molecules were just spread out evenly everywhere — the everything molecules. But if you’re Boltzmann, you know that if you wait long enough, the random fluctuations of those molecules will occasionally bring them into lower entropy configurations. And then, of course, in the natural course of things, they will expand back.

So it’s not that entropy must always increase — you can get fluctuations into lower entropy, more organized situations. Well if that’s true, Boltzmann then goes onto invent two very modern-sounding ideas — the multiverse and the anthropic principle. He says, the problem with thermal equilibrium is that we can’t live there. Remember, life itself depends on the arrow of time. We would not be able to process information, metabolize, walk and talk, if we lived in thermal equilibrium.

So if you imagine a very, very big universe, an infinitely big universe, with randomly bumping into each other particles, there will occasionally be small fluctuations in the lower entropy states, and then they relax back. But there will also be large fluctuations. Occasionally, you will make a planet or a star or a galaxy or a hundred billion galaxies.

So Boltzmann says, we will only live in the part of the multiverse, in the part of this infinitely big set of fluctuating particles, where life is possible. That’s the region where entropy is low. Maybe our universe is just one of those things that happens from time to time.

Now your homework assignment is to really think about this, to contemplate what it means. Carl Sagan once famously said that “in order to make an apple pie, you must first invent the universe.” But he was not right. In Boltzmann’s scenario, if you want to make an apple pie, you just wait for the random motion of atoms to make you an apple pie. That will happen much more frequently than the random motions of atoms making you an apple orchard and some sugar and an oven, and then making you an apple pie.

So this scenario makes predictions. And the predictions are that the fluctuations that make us are minimal. Even if you imagine that this room we are in now exists and is real and here we are, and we have, not only our memories, but our impression that outside there’s something called Caltech and the United States and the Milky Way Galaxy, it’s much easier for all those impressions to randomly fluctuate into your brain than for them actually to randomly fluctuate into Caltech, the United States and the galaxy.

The good news is that, therefore, this scenario does not work; it is not right. This scenario predicts that we should be a minimal fluctuation. Even if you left our galaxy out, you would not get a hundred billion other galaxies. And Feynman also understood this. Feynman says, “From the hypothesis that the world is a fluctuation, all the predictions are that if we look at a part of the world we’ve never seen before, we will find it mixed up, and not like the piece we’ve just looked at — high entropy. If our order were due to a fluctuation, we would not expect order anywhere but where we have just noticed it. We therefore conclude the universe is not a fluctuation.” So that’s good.

The question is then what is the right answer? If the universe is not a fluctuation, why did the early universe have a low entropy? And I would love to tell you the answer, but I’m running out of time. Here is the universe that we tell you about, versus the universe that really exists. I just showed you this picture. The universe is expanding for the last 10 billion years or so. It’s cooling off. But we now know enough about the future of the universe to say a lot more.

If the dark energy remains around, the stars around us will use up their nuclear fuel, they will stop burning. They will fall into black holes. We will live in a universe with nothing in it but black holes. That universe will last 10 to the 100 years — a lot longer than our little universe has lived. The future is much longer than the past. But even black holes don’t last forever. They will evaporate, and we will be left with nothing but empty space. That empty space lasts essentially forever.

However, you notice, since empty space gives off radiation, there’s actually thermal fluctuations, and it cycles around all the different possible combinations of the degrees of freedom that exist in empty space. So even though the universe lasts forever, there’s only a finite number of things that can possibly happen in the universe. They all happen over a period of time equal to 10 to the 10 to the 120 years.

So here’s two questions for you.

Number one: If the universe lasts for 10 to the 10 to the 120 years, why are we born in the first 14 billion years of it, in the warm, comfortable afterglow of the Big Bang? Why aren’t we in empty space?

You might say, “Well there’s nothing there to be living,” but that’s not right. You could be a random fluctuation out of the nothingness. Why aren’t you?

More homework assignment for you.

So like I said, I don’t actually know the answer. I’m going to give you my favorite scenario. Either it’s just like that. There is no explanation. This is a brute fact about the universe that you should learn to accept and stop asking questions.

Or maybe the Big Bang is not the beginning of the universe.

An egg, an unbroken egg, is a low entropy configuration, and yet, when we open our refrigerator, we do not go, “Hah, how surprising to find this low entropy configuration in our refrigerator.” That’s because an egg is not a closed system; it comes out of a chicken.

Maybe the universe comes out of a universal chicken.

Maybe there is something that naturally, through the growth of the laws of physics, gives rise to universe like ours in low entropy configurations. If that’s true, it would happen more than once; we would be part of a much bigger multiverse. That’s my favorite scenario. So the organizers asked me to end with a bold speculation. My bold speculation is that I will be absolutely vindicated by history. And 50 years from now, all of my current wild ideas will be accepted as truths by the scientific and external communities. We will all believe that our little universe is just a small part of a much larger multiverse. And even better, we will understand what happened at the Big Bang in terms of a theory that we will be able to compare to observations. This is a prediction. I might be wrong. But we’ve been thinking as a human race about what the universe was like, why it came to be in the way it did for many, many years. It’s exciting to think we may finally know the answer someday.

Thank you.

Bo Ssam, bitches!

15 Sunday Jan 2012

Posted by tearfuldishwasher in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

 

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This was dinner last night. Head over to Plate & Fork if you’re interested in the details.

 

I think it’s filed under obituaries, cuz this bitch killed us.

 

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Namaste.

 

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Der Fuchs Mit Kinder

14 Saturday Jan 2012

Posted by tearfuldishwasher in Uncategorized

≈ 8 Comments

 

 

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A day for deep enjoyment.

 

My precise and compricated pran:

 

1. Get up early and make coffee and make art.

2. Take the dog for a walk on the beach.

3. Take the wife with.

4. Put a big ass hunk of pork in the oven.

5. Clean the house.

6. Rearrange furniture as directed by woman.

7. Start drinking early.

8. Spend rest of day in kitchen.

9. Throw intimate dinner party.

10. Talk story.

11. Watch something good on the netflix.

12. Pass out.

 

 

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Ready, steady, GO!

 

 

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Namaste.

 

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She Reads Your Head Like An Open Book

13 Friday Jan 2012

Posted by tearfuldishwasher in Uncategorized

≈ 18 Comments

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So, I was listening to The Brain Science Podcast on the way home from work today. She interviewed Dr. Miguel Nicolelis about his work with the machine/brain interface. Basically he got all these monkeys to walk on treadmills, then fed the signals from their brains via the internet to a robot located in Japan. The robot in Japan would respond to the brain activity of the monkeys, and the robots actions were filmed and the images sent back to the monkeys and played on a screen in front of them so they could see the robot move in real time. Eventually the monkeys learned to control the robot without actually walking themselves.

Just thinking about it did the trick.

Here’s the doctor himself:

“The moment you are able to get the electrical signals
from the brain and use them to control the movements of an artificial tool; let’s say, a robotic arm that is located on the other side of the planet; or for that matter, on another planet, on the surface of Mars—

the moment you are able to send your brain activity to make that object move according to your voluntary will, and you are capable of receiving feedback—

sensory information—from that device back to your brain, and feel what that device is doing, that is the brain going beyond the physical limits imposed by our biological body. But what I’m talking about now is even more far-reaching, because you now can do that in real time. With this technology, in the next few decades we will be able to operate our voluntary motor will and to receive, to interpret signals that come from devices that are far removed from our bodies—and, quite frankly, could work in any kind of environment—from a nano environment to the surface of a different planet.

In that sense, we actually established this brain-machine interface, and made a robot walk. So, that was when we realized that, not only we could scale space—meaning we could get these signals out of the brain, and make an artificial body across the planet move; a body that was much bigger, and capable of producing much bigger forces than this little monkey’s body—but we could also scale time. We could enact this behavior faster than the biological machinery could do. 

At the same time as we recorded the brain activity of these monkeys as they were doing these tasks we noticed that brain cells in different areas of these animals’ were changing their firing patterns to actually assimilate the robotic components that the brain was starting to control. So, the allegiance of these neurons could very quickly be shifted from only firing in relation to the monkey’s own body’s movement, to the movements of a robotic arm or a robotic leg. 

And that’s when we realized that we were dealing with a completely different view of the brain.

But in the case of what I am proposing for the future, it is to use principles like what we learned from the experiment we just did, to basically allow brains to really broaden dramatically the perceptual experiences they can have directly with the external world; because now you’re talking about creating new sensory senses—new pathways directly to the brain—to interpret things that we normally do not perceive. And that has, in my opinion, a far-reaching future; because we are not talking only about rehabilitation (of course, that’s where things are going to come first), but in the future, you could be talking about augmenting normal human perceptual capabilities.”

*

So, you get this picture of the marvelous brain being not only incredibly plastic and dynamic in reacting to the world around it, but also not being limited by the biology it happens to find itself embodied in.

Think about that for a second.

*

Granted, the interface between our bodies and our brains is so intimate and so complex that any other setup is likely to be only a poor approximation of what it feels like to us to be embodied, but it’s beginning to seem undeniable that our consciousness might be considered ejectable. 

And the guy says it right in his little statement: it can work on any scale. Nano-technology, extra-planetary, etc.

*

The brain liberated itself initially by speech. The ability to cast itself out of the bony vault and into another person’s mind. Print expanded this exponentially and also allowed the brain to transcend the temporal limitations of its own limited life span. Now this doctor is doing experiments that are laying the foundation for the brain to become embodied in non-human environments that could potentially remove all physical and temporal limitations, or at least drastically expand the current reach.

*

Consciousness, if not already part of every subatomic structure of the universe, is on its way there. And not just any consciousness, but a kind of human consciousness. Our consciousness.

*

Of course, I think its parochial to consider consciousness to be anything like belonging to  us. We have the gift of it, but it is not ours. Not anymore than sunlight is ours.

*

Fuckin’ eggs, bacon.

*

Namaste.

***

American Crocodile

10 Tuesday Jan 2012

Posted by tearfuldishwasher in Uncategorized

≈ 11 Comments

 

 

 

*

 

I should wear a sign so you’d know I’m dangerous to you.

 

 

*

 

I can be a real beast at times.

 

*

 

 

Arrrrrgh.

 

RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRR!

 

*

 

seriously.

 

 

*

 

 

Namaste.

 

 

***

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