Keeping Time Travel

I often fear that I'm going to be sent back in time, like a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court or Army of Darkness.  One of those scenarios where the knowledge and sophistication of being a modern man are both an asset and a threat.  However, I'm really only deeply versed in technology that someone else makes.  I can't make fire alone, I can't catch and harvest alone.  I couldn't weald a chainsaw or probably even whittle a decent spear (though I will try, the next time the opportunity presents itself).

So I'd have to rely on my wits, which might be OK.  After all, I think I'm a pretty witty guy.  But I'm also not much of a people person, so when the guards drag me before the feudal lord, I'm not 100% confident I could talk my way out of it.

But it might work out, right? As an oddity alone, I might have some lasting value to some powerful person.  I'm not a military strategist, but I've watched enough History Channel in my time to be of use in some situations.  There might be broad concepts in art or architecture I may be able to convey (space-time continuum be dammed).

But there's one concern that I have, and it's very very unlikely, even in this already unlikely scenario.  I have this weird fear that the only thing I'm going to be able to remember from the modern era is the guitar riffs to certain Classic Rock songs.  Specifically, Smoke On The Water.  Songs like In-A-Godda-Da-Vida, Sunshine of Your Love and Heartbreaker also make the short list.  These deep, heavy, stable riffs of yore trigger this thought.

So what happens to me is that when these songs come on the radio (and they come on a LOT), I have this wistful little reflexive moment in my mind where I sort of sigh to myself and say, 'God, I hope this isn't all I can come up with if I go back in time.'  And then a moment later I'm like, 'What the hell IS that?!?'

Where would something like that COME from and how could it possibly get stuck so DEEPLY in my mind?!?

(Repost) Scenes from an (Action) Marriage

This was originally posted on June 19th, 2006...

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I was sent an article this morning about a 3yr old who wished for, and received, a special theme for his birthday party.  He wanted a Newshour With Jim Lehrer themed party.  As the Newshour, its theme, and its reptilian-eyed host are known favorites of mine, several different sources forwarded the story to me.  It led to the following exchange betwixt my Wife and I

INT - OFFCIE - DAY

AARON GRAFF early 30s, ruggedly handsome, shockingly charming, sits with his feet up on the desk and his laptop on his, um, laptop.  He is Instant Messaging with his wife, Victorias Secret model and (still) undercover CIA agent, Barbara Danger Roscoe.  Sitting on Aarons desk, for expository reasons, is a printout of an article sent to the two of them by anonymous sources.  The article tells the story of a 3yr old boy who wanted to have his birthday party theme be a PBS news program.   Did I mention Aaron was shirtless and his washboard abs glistened?

Aaron says:

I think I know what kind of birthday party I want...

I want an All Things Considered party!

BarGraff says:

I'll call that woman and see if I can get the pattern for the hats!

BARBARA "DANGER" ROSCOE picks up the red phone on her desk the direct line to the president, whose connections in the cake decorating underworld are well documented.  Before she is connected, Aaron responds

Aaron says:

and I want Linda Wertheimer to jump out of a cake

BarGraff says:

Lol

Bob "Tattle-Tale" Novack skulks slowly behind Barbara to find out what shes laughing out loud about.  Barbara quickly reopens the Excel spreadsheet she was working on to maintain her cover as a Victoria's Secret model who works on spreadsheets.  After a tense moment, "Tattle-Tale" Novack moves on.  "Whew", thinks Barbara, without saying anything out loud, "that was close."

Aaron says:

and then I want her to ask probing questions

BarGraff says:

oh, so Carl Castle on our answering machine just isn't good enough anymore, huh?

Aaron says:

a man reaches a certain age where he needs a little more....

we can give away Nina Tote-n-bags

BarGraff says:

goddang you're funny.

LOL!!!

You know who I should have CC'd on that email and who should be in on this convo?

Martha.

MARTHA is the deep cover agent who can not be described legally, even in a fictitious document. 

Aaron says:

should i cut and paste this into my blog?

BarGraff says:

YES!!! GOOD IDEA!! Or you can just edit it to read like a play or a script.

Aaron says:

I'll think it'll be more 'meta' if people (especially Martha) read how we talked about posting it in  the post

and I'll touch it up a bit

AARON immediately goes to work, using the governments 40 billion dollar computer system which can Cut and Paste up to 40 trillion times a second.  Also, it can launch Nukes!

BarGraff says:

col. yes. we definitely want to aim for 'meta'

okay, but don't make me look stupid.

Aaron says:

If I were to make it like a play, I'd have to force in stage directions where they don't belong

Aaron stands up and knocks some papers off his desk.  He pounds his fist in angry frustration against the wall.  He is angry and frustrated. 

BarGraff says:

people already thing I'm purposely trying to kill your career.

Aaron says:

Are you making reference to my blog entry of June 13th, 2006, titled, "Cheese and Toast" - available online now!

BarGraff says:

uh, yeah.

And with the signal of "uh, yeah" both Barbara and Aaron spring into action simultaneously, even though they are thousands of miles apart.  Did I mention Barbara was in Lima, Peru and Aaron was on the International Space Station?  Barbara pulls out a garrotte wire from her golden wristwatch and strangles Novack, who had a gun.  Aaron, taking Kirk-like advantage of the Z-axis in combat, floats down silently behind an unsuspecting Space Hitler.

Aaron says:

Not this time, Space Hitler!   Not this time, ever again!

FADE OUT as La Marseillaisen begins to play

Three Fountains in a Coin

The building I work in has a little stand up waterfall fountain thingy.  It's relatively pretty and if I had more time when walking thorough the lobby, I might even find it hypnotic.  Hell, It might even be worth trying to create a gif to throw in here, since, mathematically speaking, a 4 frame gif is equal to four thousand words of description.  Anyway, the fountain caught my eye more than once.

My company expanded to the building across the street, which is apparently owned by the same people.  I noticed their lobby had a almost the exact same fountain, with a slight variation in size.  I used to chuckle to myself about the very good day that that fountain salesman must have had back in the day.  'Sure, I can sell you this one fountain for full price, but when you buy two, I can knock of 10%'  The salesman in my mind is always the same salesman - it's Gil from the Simpsons/ Jack Lemmon from Glengarry Glen Ross.  So naturally, to see TWO sales for ol Gil is a plus! I was happy for Fountain Gil.  The two great American plays about salesmen (Glengarry and Death of a Salesmen) don't paint the rosiest of pictures about the life of a salesman, so any little victory is a plus.

One day I took a different route home through the streets of Hollywood.  I peeked into the lobby of a random building and what did I see?  Another stand-up waterfall fountain thingy!  Suddenly my whole image of Gil changed.  I wondered how many buildings in Tinseltown were adorned with the soothing white noise and hypnotic visual flow of these fountains.  Now, I imagine a successful Gil, an empowered Gil.  A raging, coked-up Gil, standing on the balcony of a stilt house hanging out over the Hollywood hills, looking down on the town and screaming out to the night, 'This is GIL'S TOWN- MY town! I OWN this fucking town!'

Dark Matter

"The only true wisdom comes from knowing you know nothing" 

-Some guy in 'Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure'

I finally GET dark matter.  I had heard the term for years in the context of bad sci-fi and good Nova episodes, but it never really clicked for me what that term meant.  Thanks to some free time and the wonders of a show called The Wonders of The Universe, I now feel pretty certain I get what the mystery is all about.

If you know how big the earth is, and you know how big the moon is, you can use that information to predict certain things about how the two bodies will orbit around one another.  It's just mass and math.  OK, saying 'just' makes it sound simpler than it really is, but still, it's something we've known as a species for a few hundred years now and it helps us figure out predictable stuff like, eclipses and planetary location and other kinda useful stuff.  If you scale that math up a stage, it still makes sense - the Sun and the planets and the nearby stars are all behaving like this.  Mass and math.  The problem comes when you scale it up ANOTHER stage.  When we take all the stars and dust and crap that we see in a galaxy and try to predict how fast that thing should be spinning, we're wrong.  So we work backwards and say, OK, if we can figure out how fast the thing is spinning, then we should know how much stars and dust and crap and matter there is. 

What that math tells us, apparently, is that based on how fast galaxies are spinning all the stars and dust and crap that we can see - all of the MATTER that we can detect - makes up only about 15% of the mass of a galaxy.  The rest... Dark Matter.

Dark Energy is the same sorta thing - we know what the math SHOULD be, but then the stuff we observe out there in the world shows us something different.

What does this all mean?  Well, it's all another example of the limits of knowledge.  I often think about this.  The limit of what is knowable.  Usually, I think about it in historical terms - someone in the past knew something important and wrote it down in a scroll or a book or a papyrus, but that scroll or book or papyrus was lost or burned or whatever and now we can never know.  It's like the pocketwatch Belloq shows Indy in Raiders, only no one ever finds the watch.  History is actually littered with many such examples, but there are many smaller examples of the unknowable in our day to day experience.  You might see initials carved into a tree while on vacation.  You will probably never be able to find out who carved them, when or why.  Your time of exposure is just to small, your means of investigation just to limited.

There are things we may want to know, but never will, and the mechanism by which each of us copes with that fact is what we call our 'belief system'.

Traditionally, the unknowable has been given over to the divine.  Whatever manifestation it takes, it's a catch-all for everything that lay beyond our explanation.  I grew up thinking of it in monotheistic terms, but just as many people have some kind of trinity in mind when they think about it.  Other cultures see it in terms of shamanistic magic or a pantheon of gods and goddesses, but the purpose of all this seems the same: to contextualize the inexplicable.

But the inexplicable doesn't stay there.  As each generation builds on the work of the previous and as our time of exposure grows and our means of investigation become less limited, unknowable things become known and new things are discovered which will remain unknowable for generations, or maybe forever. 

So how do you contextualize with divinity the ever-changing state of knowledge?  God once created light, but then we figured out how stars explode into existence, and no creator was needed.  We took the motions of the stars and the moon away from the divine, too, handing it over to gravity.  Of course, light has a 'force carrier' called a photon, which is something we understand very well.  Gravity probably has a force carrier, too, we just don't know what it is yet.  We no longer chalk up the attraction of two bodies of significant mass to the Will of God, we just say, we don't know...yet. 

Defining what we don't know is the job of science, dealing with the not-knowing is the job of the divine.

And finally back to dark matter.  I think it is so wonderful to have our knowledge violently re contextualized with the same force and fury that the divine has had to endure.  It's like that moment when Copernicus first moved God further away from the Earth, or when Newton lashed the moon to the will of the Earth, only in this case, it's the solid ground of Newtonian physics itself thats getting pushed away.  And this time observation didn't answer our questions, it questioned our answers.