Buster McLeod

I just feel like talking,

I just feel like talking, even if few feel like listening. And the funny thing is I don't have anything in particular to say. Just hi.

I read a screenplay my friend wrote, the one that K will be collaborating with when we go down to California for a week in January to live by the beach and work on art projects. Heaven. It was beautiful. I am very jealous of the work. I sat down on my hard wood floor for a full hour last night staring at something I had been working on, staring at it, waiting for it to move. And the strange thing is I feel so inspired, and yet not very productive. It's a purgatory of desire with no action. Have I Been Doing Enough. Will I Ever Be Good. Lalalalalalallalala I can't hear you.

I'm working on the book again. It's good to go away from something for a while, they say. Well, what they don't say, and I instinctually fear whenever I leave something, is that by leaving it it becomes ordinary plain lost in whatever it was trying to become but not actually becoming it. But luckily when I came back to the book, I still feel like I know it, that it is speaking my language and has more to say to me.

My dreams last night were very weird, can't talk about them here but weird they were, wery veird.

Let's work together and build something new. I love thinking those words, starting afresh, using past mistakes and new ideas to build something new, bigger, better, nicer, happier than what you've built before.

Let me be honest for a moment. I would really like to name names. Let's see. If I could say anything right now, to anyone, without thinking about tact or consequences or anything else, what would it be... I'll just keep typing until it comes to me, all stream of conscious like, zebra shoelace, striped pokka-dot lollipop, bear cage zoo, bubbles bouncing off one another, pop and gone, the weasel. It seems to be animals on my mind at the moment. When I was younger I was one of those kids who was known to love animals. Animals, drawing, these were my interests, catching butterflies and killing them, these were my interests, nets, cages, boxes, and tanks, my tools, raccoons in the trashcan were a christmas morning, fishing poles in the river, wading for crawdads, getting stuck in the mud, rolling on your side down the hill. Okay, out of daydream now.

Honestly, if I were to be honest, and say something totally honest, honestly, as it were. I would say, what would I say. I've been sitting here 10 minutes. Sometimes, an honest thing comes to the surface, and it reveals that I think much too highly of myself, and not very highly of you. But I don't think that's actually honest, that's how I'd honestly like to feel, as long as I was honestly justified in that thought. And then a couple honest thoughts came to the surface where I would say something about just how neat you are/were, what a great world this is, at least the corner over here, but even though I think some of that is honest, it's not honest enough since not personal enough, it's not idiosyncratic to how I feel right this minute. I Need More. When you're honest, the hope is that the honesty will be in some way shocking, invigorating, alive with new revelation.

It's interesting how when you look hard for one specific thing, that that specific thing, if it must represent anything at all, is very difficult to find: The One Honest Thing. The Best Day In Life. Your Favorite Animal. The Most Beautiful One. Because by being the best, it represents the beholder to some extent. To a large extent. And some of us thrive on that. Some of us find favorite everythings, so that we ourselves may be best defined, in the best company, with the best taste. And some of us balk. Lists are so compelling and interesting, because they can provide a deeper dimension to the power of best things. We don't have to stake everything on one favorite, since that particular favorite item will have flaws, and those flaws will reflect poorly on you. A list allows those flaws to be glossed over, unless they repeat throughout the list. What remains are the best of all worlds, the cream of the crop, the cherry on top.

My Favorite Snake as a child was the Black Mamba. My Best Friend's Favorite Snake was the Anaconda, and the only way I could beat that, the Largest Snake In The World, was by choosing the Black Mamba, The Fastest Snake In The World. My Best Friend and I always got in fights about this. He always chose the Biggest (Grizzly, Albatros) and I always chose the Fastest (Brown Bear, Peregrin Falcon). His Favorite Mystical Creature was the Manticore, mine was the Chimera. I'm The Most Off Topic I've Ever Been.

An honest moment. That's all you ask. I'm gay. Just kidding. I'm a Jew. Ah, screw it. There's nothing honest to be said now. Until next time.

It has been such a

It has been such a nice weekend. I have been in the best mood. Jimmy cooked a 16 lb turkey in our rickety oven, we watched a couple movies (Annie Hall, Miller's Crossing), we took some pictures of the kittens, took care of Leanne's cat while she cruised around California, and I redesigned the site again. Or just added this portal page.

I'm having that feeling again that my life is at a point where things are about as good as they get, and all of this comes in the middle of me not liking work and me feeling sick, but when taken in perspective with the rest of my life, these things don't even scratch the surface. That's me being thankful.

Back to my paranoia. I was thinking today about this question, "If you were told that by spending 2 hours a day for 30 years, you would be able to create a work of art that rivaled Shakespeare's Complete Works, would you actually spend those 2 hours a day for 30 years? Is great art, and your making it, that valuable to you?" I'm talking to myself here, in case there was any confusion. And I thought, of course, "Yes!" Then I thought, how about if it had to be 3 hours a day, and it would not quite rival Shakespeare, but more like Hemingway. Still, yes. How about if your art was only as good as Kurt Vonnegut? Hmm. No. Or maybe. I don't know. So where is that thick gray line that would separate what I would be willing to do and what I wouldn't be willing to do. And does my own confidence in my ability, just curiously, fall before, within, or beyond that gray line? I don't know how good I could be, but I'm pretty sure that my confidence shoots far beyond my gray line... making me wonder if I'm just the kind of person who has goals much further than he can reach. Not to worry though, what is this life good for other than to reach for more than you can have and die hungry? Not in a bad way. I look forward to it. I celebrate it.

I am going to be a Secret Santa, are you? I showed this to people at work (as did Alan we realized afterwards), since it has to do with Amazon wish lists, and maybe next year we'll be able to get a much larger Secret Santa Circle Started. Swell! Imagine a 30 million person Secret Santa exchange.

As you can see, I've added a link at the top called Photography. I'll talk more about it later, but it's the first I've shown of a new project I'm working on. Yes, more later. But for now, take a look at my beautiful cats.

Okay, it's late. Talk to you later. Goodnight.

This is an example of

This is an example of the type of email K receives from her father on a weekly basis. I figure that this kind of writing can't be going on without some kind of recognition on the world wide web, so here it is (if you want background information on the artists talked about here, you can reference the Foster/White artist list) (oh, and in case it's not obvious, the descriptions below in no way reflect their actual personages):

I guess we could just keep you guys in suspense indefinitely, but What the Hey...!!! Just call it an early Christmas present cuz here's the report on our first annual Foster White Web Page party!!

The gala event was held last Saturday night and we're happy to report that both the painters and re-decorators are all finished up and things are fine and everyone had a darned good time!

You'll remember that part of the fun was encouraging our guests to review the prestigious FW list of artists and come dressed as what they imagined might best represent their selected FW talent. Well, the fun started just about immediately when Baba Pujee showed up dressed as Keiko Hara! He had cleverly fitted his costume into the shape of a charming little Kamikaze plane and he flitted around the place almost non-stop for the longest time! He proved a great favorite by repeatedly climbing up to the ceiling (suction cup shoes--the real planes probably didn't have them) and diving down onto various pieces of furniture, guests, and the floor! A really interesting turn of events came when he chose to dive bomb an unsuspecting Caroline Gabworthy, dressed as Gretchen Boeing. She of course was attired in 747 motiff, her ample bottom admirably resembling her chosen widebody. At any rate, just as she was scooping up another handful of caviar ("Gotta have more jet fuel," she would shout as she powered down several pounds of stinky little eggs) the diabolically fun-loving Baba-Keiko suddenly dropped head first from our Tiffany ceiling fan and scored a direct hit on her propeller-driven beanied head! She was knocked unconscious but for a short while and, amusingly, Baba-Keiko was rendered crosseyed for almost exactly the same amount of time! How everyone laughed and chortled! The coup de gras for B-K came about an hour later when, seized by a sudden burst of inspiration, he ran full speed from the second bathroom, over the appetizer table (stepping in the punch bowl without hardly even noticing) and sprinted pell-mell straight for out giant front room picture window! Imagine the surprise and excitement when he plunged straight through the windown and on down from six floors up! He seemed to have a crooked smile on his face as the ambulance took him away. I still remember Howard Bollinger, in dress as John DeWit, remarking, "I never understood why Kamikaze pilots wore helmets anyway." Which was entirely fitting as he was posing as "John the Wit"! He just kept saying the funniest and most entertaining things all night long. Boy did he get some looks of admiration when he motioned for silence and recited the following home-grown poem:

Roses are Red
Violets are Blue
You Think This Will Rhyme But it Won't

"What remarkable wit!" called many of the guests simulaneously. Unfortunately Ms. Boeing wasn't among them as Baba had shoved her engine (just a little 10 horsepower lawn mower motor, really) well up her mouth. She was even having trouble ingesting caviar. Nonetheless she choked approvingly when Howard-DeWit remarked that it really was appropriate for Baba to have stepped in the punch bowl on his way to oblivion, "Because, after all, this IS footbowl season!" This was greeted with raucous howling and "Hear! Hears!!" Jason Pewtie, emulating Squire Broel, was so moved by this wit that he snatched up the couch and flung it out the now-vacant window atop the prostrated Baba (just before the medics got him onto the stretcher) while shouting, "That's one nut I won't be able to save for winter!" You see, in his imagination and costume he was Squire Squirrel! As he said this he even managed to wag his bushy tail in a most impressive manner. Boy, was he appreciated for his participation! And hardly anyone minded that he crawled up the curtains and, semi hidden, pelted guests strenuously with various nuts. "Stay away from my nut supply!" he would shout. "It's all I've got for a long winter!"

The guest who possibly may have mildly found this obtrusive was Marjorie Pickle. You see, she was costumed not as the very real and much-talented Virginia Weisel but as the imaginary Virginia Weasel! "You stinkin' weasels stay away from my nut supply!" he shouted scoldingly. "It's all I've got for winter. And all the forecasts say it's gonna be a cold one!" And saying this he flung, with pretty good vigor, a batch of pecans at Marj-Virginia. It was worth noting that a couple of the pointy ends of the pecans stuck in M-V's scalp and how the blood poured onto our new honey-wheat colored carpet! "A nut in the head's worth two in the belly," remarked Mr. DeWit. This made M-V forget her temporary misery and shout "Well said, great bard!"

Meanwhile "Judith LaScola," who wasn't the real Judith LaScola at all but really just Pujee Bahranahaji, was consistently getting everyone's attention with her alter ego whose name, in both Italian and Portuguese, she explained, means "The Scolder." And in this spirit she had donned a pair of incredibly bushy and disapproving eyebrows and would scrunch her face up unappealingly and go around and scold everyone. This would have been received, I'm sure, in a most jocular way were it not for the fact that she carried with her a one-yard straight-edge ruler with which she smacked guilty parties squarely on the knuckles! Again, how the blood flowed! A guilty party, by the way, was anyone who forgot to say, "Judith May I?" before breathing. You have to admit it was really clever! "Is this the RULE of the house?" asked brother DeWit, bringing forth glee and hilarity to those bandaging their hands.

And you should have seen WeiWei Lu! What a riot! She played the part of Karen Laband and mingled the whole evening while masquerading as practically a whole orchestra! She had ingeniously rigged up all these automon arms (her husband's into robotics, you know, having the computer gene and all...) and each held and played a different instrument! There was the accordion, there was the bugle, there were the drums, there were the bells, there was the tenor sax, there was the piano and the pipe organ. Imagine the beauty! Imagine the volume, as she often played several or all together! Everyone laughed when a hazelnut projectile went up her tuba and lodged in her throat! She must have puked for 15 minutes before she was good to go again! "Regurgitation is Good, but not in your Harmonica," cried out the Witty One. Even more laughter.

And what of the fun-loving Edmund Millspring? Who but he would have thought of coming as Mandred Lindenberger?!? And dressed as what?!? Why, a giant limburger cheese chunk of course! How people laughed through their tears at the authentic smell! Because the canny Edmund-Manny had had the good sense to smear himself liberally with goat manure just before arriving at the party! It was such a riot watching him chase the squirrel and the weasel all around the apartment, since ordinarily those creature would have been chasing after him (perhaps shouting, "Hey, how about a nibble out of your cheesy be-hind?...while baring front choppers menacingly)! He finally caught them both, in the bathtub, and laughingly ripped down the shower curtain and bound them in that until he could do a proper job with one of our Persian carpets. He then rolled them good-naturedly around the room and who cares that the dining room set came crashing down around their smelly forms within five minutes? Talk about finger food and chair legs and goat manure everywhere!!

I could go on and on, as it seemed the fun would never end. But I think you've gotten the flavor of the thing and perhaps you might want to run it by Don to see if he wouldn't like to host a Web Party of his own.

Gaily Yours,
Pop

I've been noticing lately just

I've been noticing lately just how superstitious those who work around computers are. You'd think that in this environment, you're working with a huge calculator basically that relies entirely in 0s and 1s--not only that but those 0s and 1s were put there explicitly by another human, that the ancient instinct of attributing random behaviors to desired results would be weaker than other less purely mechanical environments.

Yet, every day, even with co-workers, I find people exhibiting the strangest superstitions about how to get their computers to do what they want them to do. "When it acts like this, I turn the monitor on and off, and more often than not that fixes the problem." "If you're not seeing the changes that you're expecting on the file, try clearing all your cookies, that fixed it for me when I was having a similar problem." "If the pulldown menus aren't working, minimize and maximize the browser a couple times."

I read about this psychology experiment once where there was a group of pigeons, and you feed them at random time intervals throughout the day. After a while, each pigeon will begin to associate whatever they were doing when they got fed as a cause that resulted in food being brought out. Over time, each pigeon will then repeat over and over that idiosyncratic behaviour, hoping that again it would bring food. Are we any different when it comes to working computers?

Computers, perhaps, are so grounded in logic and numbers that they create a cloudy mystical magical tension between the conflicting knowledge that at their core EVERYTHING is explicable, and the actual experience of them being so flakey and unpredictable. Voila, the birth of superstition.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this, and something that reveals a true quirkiness in the universe, a happy-go-lucky-ness, if you will, built into the very fabric of our space-time-wakka-wakka continuum, is the fact that almost always, our superstitions are humoured and actually produce the results that they were falsely believed to create.

Why else would the tv actually start working again when you kick it? Why else does turning off your computer, letting it rest, cool down so to speak, remove all the glitches that you'd been trying to remedy in a more step-by-step detective sort of way? It's true! Someone is having a laugh at our expense!

Today I was in the

Today I was in the elevator. Our building has two elevators that work (the other two are still under repairs from the earthquake). As I was in the elevator, for some reason, I was struck by the location of the elevator buttons. They're on the right, if you're facing the door, but I felt like they were normally on the left, or that maybe the other elevator has the buttons on the left. I tried to remember. In the process of remembering, I had to raise each of my arms, as if pressing the button on either side of the door, to see if it triggered any familiar memory in my arms. Not until I tried my left arm did I realize that I never pressed an elevator button on the left side of the door in this particular building. It was weird, as if this piece of knowledge was stored in my right arm (not my left) (and not my brain).

How closely tied is the body with memory? Are there memories in my feet? Like which pedal is the gas and which is the break? In order to figure that out, I have to engage my feet, if not motion them as if they were pressing each pedal. Same with typing. Where on the keyboard is the 'x'? This information is in your fingers, or at least mine.

If you take this a step further, are there memories kept outside of our body? Do you remember what your parent's house was like when you were a child better when you're actually in the house? The brain has its fingers all over the world. I believe that I know the phonenumbers of all my friends, but that's mostly because I know how to get them (they're in the speed-dial). Does that count as memory?

Are you dumber if you store most of your memory in notebooks and pdas and in clippings on the fridge? Or is this just an extension of our use of tools. Tools that supplement the brain, that store information in a compact digital format and which we can retrieve by storing a single 'key' in our own head: 'the addresses are in the address book'. Then, whenever we need that information, rather than querying our brain for the actual number, we query it for the key that will lead us to the actual number.

Again, this is an old boring thought, but it seems new to me. The idea of condensing information in our limited-capacity head by replacing the entire library with a dewey decimal card catalog... is this progress or a backward step?

The limitation of removing the bulk of information from our minds is that we now rely on external tools to be within arms reach for us to access it. What if you are taken on a timewarp back to pre-industrial revolution days and were inclined to share your knowledge, and yet you realized that all of your memory and knowledge was stored in that palm pilot that you neglected to bring back with you?

But, does that limitation matter in a practical world? Do we really need to learn complex math when we will most likely always have access to a calculator for our complex equations? Do we really need to remember our family's birthdays when MSN Reminders can email us when they come close? Do we really need to remember our past when we have a journal to record it?

I've been listening to Chopin's

I've been listening to Chopin's Piano Sonata no. 2 in B flat minor, op.35: Marche funèbre all morning, on repeat. It's so beautiful.

I'm not going to mention the plane crash, since it turns out I have no news you don't already know... other than my opinion, I suppose. I'll spare you that; in fact, I've spared even myself that luxury. Nice not to have an opinion, and just let others' flow through you, pushing thoughts aside, and leaving. Nothing is new.

(transition)

I saw Margaret Cho last night. She was hilarious. I like how stand up comics (is that even her title?) are becoming more political and artistic and multi-faceted (like an insect eye). Her performance included social commentary, humanitarian pleas, news coverage, jokes, tragic personal stories, fears, hopes, and even an opening choir. I like this trend for everyone to be all things for all people.

(transition)

Fame! I want to live forever. It's strange how tempting the prospect of limited and meaningless fame is. This is evident when you go to a filming of something (which the event last night was), and conversation of "laughing inappropriately so that you can say, 'hey, that's my laugh!' when the dvd comes out. If people want this kind of fame, which is cheap and meaningless, why are they so hesitant to admit that they want the other kind of fame, the kind that comes from recognition of your own work and self? We want to make a mark on the world by laughing in the background of a soundtrack, piggy-backing on their streaming content to the masses, and yet the common opinion of a desire for real fame is laden with criticism of 'too much work', 'fame has its price', 'it isn't as rewarding as one might think', etc. Perhaps... perhaps! Perhaps there is a gene in our minds that makes us rationalize why we do not want things that we do not think we can have. As if it is a reverse-engineering of the survival of the fittest. In order to survive when you are not fit, you must convince yourself that fitness isn't desirable.

(transition)

And now, some links:

• The Web Archive is really cool, and people have finally stopped talking about it which means its safe to mention again. This company gets its information from Alexa which, oddly enough, is owned by Amazon. And I always get a smile on my face when I remember the good ol' days of anonymous.diaryland.com. Their archive is based on a database that is over 100 terabytes in size, "and is growing at a rate of 10 terabytes per month, eclipsing the amount of data contained in every library in the world including the Library of Congress, and making it the largest known database in existence." Did you realize that the internet was even this large?
• Fireland is looking good.
• Alan has a new project up, again amazing me with his ability to bring an interesting perspective to things: MegaFauna. I want more information on this Chalicotherium, an animal that had the face of a horse, the neck of an ox, and massive front arms with which it used its knuckles instead of palms to walk on. What the!

So I redesigned again. Again, going against all of my proclamations of the week before, throwing out new work, going back to old. I think it's because I keep on thinking that I can do more here than I actually can. I need to seriously realize that words are words, design is design, shapes are shapes, and no magical twisting of this internet rubik's cube is going to create the all-relevant, all-singing, all-important, no-maintenance-required solution to daily journaling. So simple is back in, and I'm just going to sit on it for a while.

Seattle is full of people

Seattle is full of people from all corners of the sphere. The people walking down the street on any given day are as random as the bounty of a net that you drag along the ocean floor. Variety bursting forth, the infinitude of possibilities manifesting itself as a nation of skew rays of light, refracting and reflecting on the pixels of your multifaceted insect eye.

And yet, walking down the street yesterday, I overheard two different sentence fragments from two different sets of infinite possibility, both of them saying, "And she was like, excuse me...".

The sentence I added a

The sentence I added a day after I had written the last entry was this, "Funny how science can get intermingled with our fantasies and dreams and stories and popular culture in a way until it turns into this granite ball resembling ourselves more than the universe it is trying to describe." Very sort of stupid and obvious idea now that I sit and look at it again, but it's been sitting in my frontal lobe for the last week, sitting on the verge of talking and telling me more, but ultimately remaining silent.

This is what I want to know. People, and you know you're one of them, often talk about how there are certain things they do during the day that cause them to think, certain activities where ideas are almost always acheived: in the shower, in the moment before sleep, brushing your teeth. These are all activities that are so minimal that they do not require your full attention, and yet active enough to occupy you so that you don't feel the need to do anything else. Like little doorjams that hold the door open to the outside, just barely, while giving the impression of the door still being closed. Because the closed door is safe. With the door to the outside world closed, thoughts are accounted for and aren't going to harm you. But with this door ajar, even slightly, ideas come in and they are usually dull but sometimes great.

I just thought of that because for me my walks to and from work are the doorjams. People often offer to give me rides, and I always decline because that really is the most enjoyable part of my day, when I can be alone, still justified in my activity (walking isn't like sitting alone in a closet, but it has the same advantages), and able to figure things out.

I am feeling a kindred spirit with josh and his new deep and breap website. I am going in a direction I think it's impossible to turn around from. Forward or backward I don't know.

How can I become more real here. How can I be reminded more often of the life I am living and the fact that it can be manipulated, changed, directed in directions that I desire? If I want something, take action to acheive it. Wake up. That kind of thing. Grandparents are dying every day. Today K was a witness at the reading of a will for millions of dollars. I was talking the other day with Jimmy about how we (and our friends) had changed over the years (I've known him for almost a decade now), and we tried to sum up the essential 'thing' that had made us feel so different and unique in highschool, that had made us feel invincible and grand and super-powered, and whether or not something had left or something had changed or if nothing in fact had changed and whether we are still the same as we were then or deluded then or deluded now... we didn't talk about all of this, but this is what the message meant to me. And the way we were before was a little more interesting: we were convinced that we could life a life against the rules, not the laws, but against convention and without support from tradition or money or routine or everything that is evil. And then I thought about how all I think about is money these days, and how I've become a different kind of person, one that needs money. Not to buy things, necessarily, but to free me from the oppression of having to earn it. Old boring hat.

The things I think about are already reflected in so many of my other past thoughts that I can only really see me, and not the thing I'm thinking about.

Are you an existentialist? K is. We argue about it often. It's one of my favorite arguments.

Eggnog lattes are out for the season, I remember thinking about them last year, and they make me just as happy this year. I'm 25 years old, and getting older, I remember being in london with one friend who was 25 and thinking, "I'm doing exactly the same thing he's doing and I'm three years younger. What a waste for him." This is how I think. And here I am at 25, and what have I done with the extra time I had? Is it enough? I think it just barely meets the minimum requirement and doesn't at all set a good pace for the kind of achievement I want to reach by the time I'm, say, 30, or 40. I need more. I still haven't found what I'm looking for. Help. HELP!

Today talk at the lunch

Today talk at the lunch table veered towards Schroedinger's Cat, and what his deal was. Post-lunch surfing veered towards finding the truth of this scientific fable, and then links posted to our mailing list veered towards this one:

http://www.telp.com/philosophy/qw2.htm (don't read this yet)

Schroedinger's Cat originates from something Schroedinger wrote in a longer, more complicated and therefore maybe more boring analysis of Quantum Mechanics. In it, there are two paragraphs dedicated to the cat, which, when taken in context with the larger document, do exactly the opposite of what we (the masses) have taken from it.

When asked at the lunch table what this cat was all about, we got a couple different answers.

One person said it was a thought experiment designed to illustrate how our perception alters our own reality, how if we were living in Africa (clearly the most remote extension of this muddy ball called earth) and we had not heard of the events of 9/11, we would act in a way "as if it had never happened". So, if we never opened the box to see if Schroedinger's Cat was alive or dead, our universe would not be affected by the event within the box until we looked into it. Trees in forests, one hand clapping, these things come to mind.

Another person thought that it somehow involved many cats in many boxes, which if you opened one box, the fates of all the other cats in all the other boxes would be effected, slightly. Flipping quarters come to mind.

The actual Schroedinger's Cat metaphor, as it is misunderstood by most people, is that there is this radioactive material within the box. It has equal chances of decaying or not decaying, on the quantum level. There is a poisonous gas released into the box, killing the cat, if it decays, therefore amplifying the effect of the quantum occurence into the realm that we can understand. Some objects in the quantum world supposedly exist in superpositions, meaning that they do not actually take on the properties of common sense until some action forces them to commit to one or the other. So, in this case, the radioactive material in the box exists in a state of both decay and undecay until acted upon. Sometimes, this act is simplied to be the act of "observation", since it is impossible to observe something in the superposition state.

It goes on and on. Basically, when you open the box, the particles have to 'decide' whether they have killed the cat or not, then go back in time, do the deed, and commit to acting as if that was the only thing that ever happened all along. Very mischevious little particles.

The brain-twister part of this metaphor is "How can something as harmless as observing the particles cause this crazy reaction?". And it made me realize, like a baby, that observation cannot happen without reaction. As harmless as sight seems, it requires light to be bouncing around, off the objects, into your eyes. Light has energy, sound has energy, basically every device which records something relies on something to go and physically touch the object it's observing, and be returned to the observer. It's like throwing a tennis ball against a wall, measuring the amount of time it takes to come back, and then realizing how far away the wall is. If the wall is on a float within a pool, perhaps the act of throwing the tennis ball against it has pushed it back a little, thus changing the distance, and causing your observation to be slightly inaccurate. Quantum particles exist in such a tiny little world that something as harmless as light has enough energy to invigorate those particles into changing their state, making them different than they were before you bounced your heavy light particle off of it.

And the funny thing is that Schroedinger meant this metaphor to illustrate just how ridiculous this idea of a cat being dead and alive at the same time was, not as a theory that proved that it was dead and alive at the same time. Funny how science can get intermingled with our fantasies and dreams and stories and popular culture in a way until it turns into this granite ball resembling ourselves more than the universe it is trying to describe.

The world is so interesting. We should investigate it and find out what's going on over there. Speaking of which, Stephen Hawkings has a new book coming out: The Universe In A Nutshell.

Greetings from Amazon.com. As you

Greetings from Amazon.com.

As you requested, here is your Special Occasion Reminder

Your Reminder
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Who you're celebrating: Dad
Occasion type: Other
Occasion date: October 30
Personal note: Died in 1993.
Person's age:
You'll receive your e-mail reminder: one week before, day of the occasion

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