newer log
Nearly done with Perdido Street Station. A good book, a very good book, rich and strange. Very action-movie in the second half, which is fine (although I'd really love a novel of ideas that was this rich and this strange).
One oddity: the diction is nearly perfect, a slightly archaic and slightly steampunk / fantasy voice. Except that the author thinks that "way" is a perfect synonym for "far".
"Way above the heads of the roof-people, bloated airships ploughed across the sky.""Way ahead of me and way behind the river slithers and throws rubbish in rhythmic little bursts against the bank."
I can't decide if this is an accident (an odd defect in an otherwise seamless voice), or a conscious affectation (an attempt perhaps to habilitate the idiom, raise it a notch above the kid-slang where it sits now), or perhaps an entirely correct usage in a language I don't speak myself (just around the corner from the universe I live in).
Another glimpse of an alternate linguistic universe: a mother and daughter standing near me as we wait for the elevator, and the mother says to the daughter, her voice clear and accentless, "your shoestring is untied, honey".
The word "shoestring" rattles around in my head for awhile. The thing she was referring to is of course (of course!) a shoelace, but I have a vague memory, and eventually the vague memory turns out to be of "shoestring potatoes", which I think I ate as a lad.
So now I imagine this whole subculture of people, with their own newspapers and DVDs and best-seller lists, their own Britney Spearses, who differ from the culture that I know primarily in that they say "shoestring" for "shoelace".
And yet another linguistic hiccup ("hiccough"): I overheard a couple of psychiatrists talking shop yesterday, and among other things they were comparing the number of "arc one" and "arc two" cases in various populations. I asked them what "arc one" and "arc two" meant, and they said something like: arc one are the traditional comparatively obvious diseases that one is pretty sure one obviously ought to treat (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, usw), whereas arc two are the more nebulous personality problems (or even just personality features) that are perhaps more a matter of taste.
I went to look these terms up on the Web once I got back to a connection, of course, and I didn't find anything. It was very odd.
I appeal to my readers, in fact, to help me out here: can someone with better searching skills than I have find references on "arc one" and "arc two" as psychiatric terms? Or did I perhaps hear them wrong? (Maybe it's "Snark Gun" and "Park Glue".)
And speaking of alternate universes, at least one reader continues to be dubious about the recent Scientific Breakthroughs showing that the universe contains an infinite number of copies of me (the SciAm piece is now online):
In an alternate universe, the language of physics is prose, and Einstein was a poet.Oh good grief! Go read the papers you reference. Knobe makes the entirely trivial argument that if (a) there are only a finite number of histories in any finite region of the universe and (b) the universe is infinite then (c) all possible histories are played out an infinite number of times. This is third-grade physics. You need to examine the assumptions.
ah, the one made out of fried eggs, now you're talking. I went there once after a few too many bottles of cider. You feel a bit ill after a while, though. This one turns out to be quite nice after all.
"The key question is not whether parallel universes exist, but how many levels there are." "Yeah, and if you make it all the way to level 12 you're doin' pretty good, dude, how bout those ninja spongecakes in level 10, had me sweating for a while!"
Imagine a world where pi=22/7 is the law of the land, and that law is enforced.
In fact even in third-grade physics, (a) and (b) don't imply (c); every finite bit of the infinite universe could contain exactly the same history, or the infinite universe could capriciously contain all but one of the possible ones, or all the ones that don't involve mutant spongecakes. Eh, what?
(But I suppose I really ought to actually read one or more of these papers. Someday.)
And finally in blog news, we note that the very admirable Long Story Short Pier has declared us a parent, and that Ms Magazine has a blog.
On that physics paper, a reader or two writes:
I haven't read it (yet), but here's a good filter. If it doesn't have equations in it, then, these days, it ain't a physics paper. And philosophy papers are just as good as they've always been at predicting empirical results.Physics paper: looks to me like pseudo-scientific gibberish based on a really thin understanding of physics
Ironically (or not), pretty much this exact same ("exact same") idea is the cover story on this month's Scientific American (the May 2003 issue; it's not up on their site yet). "Infinite Earths in Parallel Universes Really Exist".
No equations apparent in that article, either.
Here's the author's page on the subject (warning: really painful page design). Someone with more energy than I have this evening should look it over.
And speaking of alternate universes, have you heard that Apple is in talks to buy Vivendi Universal? (MeFi thread) That would be interesting.
Someone's got to figure out the future of commercial music; it'd be neat if it was Apple. Or a couple of pink-haired girls in a garage in New Mexico; that'd be neat too.
top
earlier entries