New iPhone. 4 inches is all she needs (apparently).
The Ronin
I went to a high school where it was just me and the teacher - well, my last two years of high school. I was missing 70 days of school (and still maintaining 90s) because I was bored and my guidance counsellor suggested a school where I could finish at my own pace. I finished in a three months but stayed on for the year to let the teacher keep his job. There was a Japanese student who finished in two weeks - a genius of sorts.
My English teacher was a real shit-kicker - he bucked the system and made me real all kinds of books that are beyond the politically correct acceptance by your schools today. One such book was William Dale Jennings’s “The Ronin.” What a book. I still think of it time to time. It’s under a hundred pages so you’ve got no excuse not to read it.
It starts out with our protagonist who’s a violent, violent man. He slashes people head to toe. He binds a woman and hangs her upside down by her hair while raping her and placing playing cards in her vagina. Over and over again. Chopping people to bits and raping women.
There is a point to the story. That’s just the first few pages of the book. When the freelance samurai-for-hire (a masterless swordsman known as a ronin) kills a monk by splitting him in two, he’s twaned. He reevaluates his life and drops the sword. He decides to tunnel a road through a mountain to atone for his crimes - it takes years and years.
It’s a Zen-Buddhist novel written by an Englishman in the 1960s. I recommend that you get high before reading this. I still don’t know what to make of it. It’s an onion of a novel.
Don’t bother with marriage
The other day I was talking with a woman who’s much smarter than me. She’s a psychologist and a good friend. I’ve got the IQ of a Chihuahua. When I’m not hankering for snausages I’m scootering around on the floor or trying to self-fellate via plough pose (think of the “Short Bus” scene at the beginning of the movie). I kid, I kid.
Anyways, we got to talking about marriage. No fire sermon from me today. Here’s the gist of the conversation:
Men do anything a woman asks while they’re dating and for the first few years of the marriage because they want sex. As the sex starts to wane (because of work, female issues like moodiness or that thing called emotions, or having a kid to take care of) the men start losing interest in the relationship. The control either reciprocates (i.e. the men become in charge) or they go their separate ways. Guys then look for an extramarital booty call and the circle of cheating and misery starts, dies and is reborn over and over again.
Don’t get married folks.
“Lots of dead or dying bodies. Thought I was in a morgue.”
That was one of Sandra Leduc’s tweets as she ascended Mt. Everest this month. Many people end up running out of oxygen as they attemp the three to four hour trek past the Hillary Step. Leduc herself ran out of oxygen as her regular froze on the three hour trek to base camp - “could barely stand in last 30 mins.”
Leduc’s a lawyer for the Canadian Embassy in Afghanistan and always dreamed of climbing Mt. Everest. She survived, although another Canadian perished on the same journey (Shriya Shah-Klorfine).
Read her tweets - they’re worth it. If you think you can handle Everest, read her blog and tweets first. There’re lots of scary moments: “At approx 3am on the 20th, 2-3 hours from summit, my sherpa yelled out that we needed to go down immed. Worse weather he had ever seen.”
At the end of the day, it is what it is. Leduc was “very sad to leave” the mountain - “this is one of hte most beautiful places in [the] world. Feel privileged to have spent 2 months at EBC.”
Sandra Leduc’s Twitter, her blog, and you can listen to her on CBC’s “As It Happens”
At first I thought it was a crypto-Honda ad, but now I’m not so sure. It certainly has that “Apple” magic.
Diablo III’s a Skinner Box
Diablo III’s a Skinner box (formally called an Operant Conditioning Chamber). BF Skinner put rats in boxes and had them click buttons repeatedly for treats. Diablo III works on the same principle, you beat monsters to death and grab their loot. The game’s for digital hoarders and extremely addictive. Thus, it’s a Skinner box.
Can we time travel?
Altogether now (channelling Christoph Waltz!), “ooh goodie! Time travel!”
Yes, I’m a huge fan of time travel. Could it exist? If it did why haven’t we seen anyone from the future yet? That would suppose we’re living in the past but to us it feels like the present. Perhaps we’re living in the present and therefore the future hasn’t happened yet. But, if we traveled to the past it’d be their present. So, you see the dilemma, don’t you?
Well, if you’ve got a minute, then sit down and swallow the blue pill Dorothy, cuz we’re not in Kanasas anymore.
Time in some sense is something very intuitive - we always use it. When one asks what is time it becomes much more problematic.
We seem to think that the now has a priviledge to it. The present is reality…and so on. We think about each moment coming from the future and becoming a present reality — and it becomes the past. It’s then stored as memory or in archaeology.
What about the idea that “time flows?” We experience time as the present.
We also think of the future as having possibilities whle the past cannot be changed. The future is undetermined in many ways and the past is unchanged from what it was.
It’s not easy to uproot common sense. There are two main modes when talking about time: they are related to two different theories of time - dynamiic time and non-dynamic time.
For example:
- Pierre Trudeau becomes Prime Minister of Canada: the past
- Our deaths: the future
- We connect Sir John A. Macdonald as being an earlier Prime Minister to Trudeau
- We connect our birth happening before our death
Yet, there’s no mention of past and future - nothing absolute of where the past or the future is - it’s only correlated to other things.
Tensed theory of time = time is dynamic
The relative way of talking of time is the tenseless theory of time - time is not dynamic.
If, with no events occurring there is still a past, present and future. It happens independently of our existence.
Tenseless theory of time versus Tensed thory of time:
The Tenselss theory is very static, like a line in space. Some say only the present exists - the past is only a memory. The first view is that the past and the present exist. It’s in a 2-dimensional space This is also known as Possibilism: “The Tree Model” or the “growing block” model. The things in the cube are real while the things outside of the cube are non-existent yet.
The second view is called Presentism or “Nowism”
Unlike before, you don’t have a cube. The existence is always a passage of time. It’s assoicated with Prior from New Zealand. Another variation is whether the present time has any dimension or whether it is an interval.
The question as to what is the present? Or how long is the present? It becomes tricky because it can represent 0 or infinity and it connects to Zeno’s argument (I’ll talk about Zeno in further depth later).
For simplicity we think of the present as a point.
The presentists think about the growing block as time as a tree growing from the past, present to the future. The past represents the real but can’t be undone. The present is the real. While the future is unreal and open. The growing block model has the past and the present as real. The important thing is that the past is real and cannot be undone.
Objections to the tensed theory of time:
This one is very intuitive and has many problems. The question of the present puts us in an uneasy situation.
The other problem is “how fast does time flow?”
One second per second? This only makes sense with a background time. Whatever measure of time you use you will have to measure it to another time. However, you measure time when you need to compare it to another time and this goes on ad infinitum. Tense time means time flows independently. If you ast the question on time flowing - then you’re comparing an order of time with another order of time. In philosophy, if you answer with an infinite regress than you’re in trouble.
The answer which tries to solve this problem was answered by C.D. Broad: it’s to answer that a better response is to deny that the ‘now’ moves with respect to time. It does answer the question but we’re still puzzled. It’s not a paradox, but rather a problem.
The second thing that puzzles many is: if the future doesn’t exist it is neither true nor false. For example: “Your work ends at 6 p.m.” According to the tense theory of time, the proposition about when your work will end is neither true nor false.
Why people say the future is neither true nor false accords to the tense theory. We have to make the difference between epistemology and metaphysics. Propositions about the future are neither true nor false. For every true (false) supposition, there’s supposed to exist facts taht make it true (false).
The world may be deterministic and there are effects about the present that we can theorize about the future - this reply is not open to debate if the world is indeterministic. According to theory, the future does not exist unless you believe in determinism.
Your work will end at 6 p.m. because of the deterministic probabilities that exist in the work world.
The thrid objection creates many problems. The Special Theory of Relativity (STR) holds that the present depends on the ‘observer’ (be it person or an object). The theory of relativity was introduced by Albert Einstein - which replaced the Newtonian model about space and time.
Newton’s theory posits that time is absolute. My ‘now’ is like your ‘now’. In relativity theory, it I walk in a direction from where you are seated - the now changes. So, it depends on how fast I move in the now - it’s relative to the speed of how things move to each other. If my now is different than your now than my future is different from your future - and thus we have different futures. There is no present in STR, just many presents. If there are different presents than there are different futures. What is real for me is not real for you.
Newton’s theory of time is absolute - and all people and objects share these times. STR has many different nows. It means we have different realities. If I know your time and you know my time, we’ll have a correlation. It does depend on speed at some level - and that’s strange.
It’s not just about experience - it’s about what happens. The difference according to this theory is different things happen to different people.
The tensless theory of time:
The block universe is somewhat similar to what Zeno said: nothing changes in this block - but obviously they exist in different times. Time is relational - the past, present and future are relational. The fact that death comes after birth - it’s only relative. There is no passage of time and the present doesn’t become important. Everything is real. We can New York, Toronto and Lond exist - the past, present and future exist but on a line. Time travel is much easier to think of in teh tensless theory of time. In this approach, time is just another dimension and reality is depicted in the 4th-dimension.
Did I answer your question about time travel? No? It’s a challenging theory to triage and I’ll provide more clues next time!
Read between the lines
A bit of epiphany struck me this morning, there’s no point rewording stories and then commenting on them. It’s time to just post the link to the story and then do you folks justice by deconstructing it and well, read between them lines.
Stories are meant to link bait you, to nab your attention and grab you by your pubic hairs so you daren’t leave said page. That’s why many sites have dirty sidebars with celebrity gossip to keep you clicking.
The more sensationalist the story, the more prone you’ll be to click at the link. What’s that say about the average dunderpate? It says everything about the world we live in. We’re not heading to Mike Judge’s Idocracy, we’re living in it!
