Friday, November 13, 2020
You get a bad Irish accent! And you! What's that? You are Irish? You get a bad Irish accent too!
Irish are a hard group to actually offend. Someone said "hold my beer" and this abomination was birthed straight from the bowels of ifreann. First, the reaction:
Thursday, November 12, 2020
Journalization of life
When I started this blog 18.5 years ago, it was used as a true log or journal of my life. I slowly transitioned away from this for various reasons. The biggest reason is that a publically available record of your life can reveal things which may be useful to use against you in one way or another, by both people you know and people you don't know. Beyond that, the world is different today than it was in the early aughties. Another reason is that Facebook took over many of the duties of life-record without all the work of building my own content from scratch every time I wanted to post something. Facebook is still not good for long-form or detailed accounts of events. For that, blog remains the superior platform for recording my view of events in writing.
Even still, there is value in providing an online journal of one's life. For me, and most humans, memories fade. Specific memories are still noodling around in our heads, but they are buried underneath millions of other noodles. I didn't realize the importance of this until recently, when I was going over my blog's history.
Reading the past posts reminded me of events, and even just average days from my past. In fact, I ran across a couple of posts that describe things that I don't remember at all now, similar to how no-one remembers most of the first two years their life but there's those embarrassing baby photos that your parents pull out from time to time.
Posting about my life doesn't generate traffic like my posts about life in our Universe or beeper codes, but that's not the real point of this blog anyway. I'll still post about things I find interesting in the same manner as before. However, I'll try to post a bit more about my daily life too (more than just Instagram photos). I've actually started doing this since September this year. I hope to do it even more often.
Wednesday, November 11, 2020
Tuesday, November 10, 2020
Monday, November 09, 2020
Sunday, November 08, 2020
Saturday, November 07, 2020
Friday, November 06, 2020
Thursday, November 05, 2020
Wednesday, November 04, 2020
Tuesday, November 03, 2020
Thursday, October 08, 2020
The Three Theys of Interstellar
The third "they"
The movie Interstellar runs deep with current known science and also notions of time (in a manner that is not well-enough understood by science). In the movie, there are several discussions that refer to "they" as the architects (my word) of the events within the movie. "They" is used to refer to the creators of the wormhole, the same wormhole that brings humans to a distance galaxy to find habitable worlds. "They" is also used to describe the creators of the tesseract within Gargantua Black Hole into which Cooper falls. There's actually a third "they" used by Brand (daughter of Professor Brand) where she unknowingly shakes Cooper's hand while she's in the wormhole and while the tesseract collapses around Cooper. She mistakenly refers to Cooper as "them".
The second "they"
While in the tesseract, Cooper hypothesizes (or guesses) that "they" are future descents of humans. When viewing the movie's narrative superficially, "they" are the ones who set everything up to allow colonization of distance worlds, and also to allow Cooper to survive within the Black Hole long enough to send back the necessary data to solve Professor Brand's equations. The movie does not provide any further explanation, but does hint that Cooper's guess is not 100% accurate. This hint comes when he becomes third "they" during the aforementioned handshake with Brand. Also, Tars specifically calls the creators of the tesseract by the moniker "Bulk Beings".
Cooper's explanation for "they" is flawed. If "they" are our descents and also the creators of the wormhole, this forms a "Bootstrap Paradox". If the wormhole didn't exist, we'd have no ability to save humanity in order to have our descents create the wormhole.
Getting stuck on this Bootstrap Paradox assumes this movie presents the final and accurate explanation for "they" or the "Bulk Beings'. However, if the creators of the wormhole are different from the Bulk Beings (creators of the tesseract), the paradox evaporates.
The first "they"
Cooper was right in his guess that we were solving our own problems. We got our selves to the wormhole. We investigated several habitable worlds on the other side. Cooper himself fell into the Black Hole and interacted with Murph. However, what's the moment that prevents the paradox and allows Bulk Beings to exist? This moment is when Brand colonizes Edmond's Planet. Her colony saved the human species, but not humans on Earth. Her colony's eventual descents (the Bulk Beings) had to finish the job. They had to enable the survival of humans on Earth. They did so by creating the tesseract for Cooper inside of Gargantua.
So, who are the creators of the wormhole that kicked off human survival? Who are the first "they" of Interstellar? My best guess is that "they" are simply an interested party who provided us with a way to save ourselves, if we are ready to be saved. The first "they" of Interstellar are different non-human related beings who were possibly even more advanced than the Bulk Beings.