03.24.06
Posted in Movies, Nerdy at 10:07 am by Aaron
Last night Laura and I watched “What the Bleep Do We Know?”, which, I should say for those who recommended it, was well worth watching and was certainly a good conversation-starter. Very enjoyable.
But the premise? It certainly left me with a lot of questions. For those who haven’t seen the movie, the basic idea is that, in light of all the latest in quantum mechanics, we have proven that humans can mentally construct reality in any way they choose, because reality as we know it is illusory. If you look at solid matter, it is actually made up of loose clouds of molecules, and those of loose clouds of atoms and so on, ad infinitum.
The idea that the movie puts forward is that we are one with the universe, and, as the one lady (who is channeling a 35,000 year old mystic from Atlantis) concludes, we are God.
The trouble for me is that a lot of the ideas in the film are in the same neighbourhood as my own beliefs, so the bizarre tangents are a little off-putting.
First off, some of the claims in the film are completely false. They refer to the “Maharishi Effect” (meditators could lower the crime rate) which was “proven” in an uncontrolled experiment in Washington when the crime rate was miraculously lowered by 25% by the 4,000 meditators. Cursory fact checking shows that crime actually rose in Washington during that period, though the organizers claimed success. But when “facts” like this are getting thrown at you in a movie, its hard to filter them out amid all the physicists who are also saying all kinds of quantum-zaniness.
They also refer to another experiment wherein some guy claimed that water reacts to words, as proven by him taping affirming messages to glasses of water, then photographing the supposed results. Again, it seems that he forgot to mention that he froze the water.
What bothered me most, though, was the whole “nothing is certain, therefore I am the centre of the universe” leap of logic. What about the corollary? Far from being your own creator and supreme observer, what if you are nothing more than a transient cluster of atoms floating in an infinite void filled with nearly indistinguishable particles? The fact that quantum particles change when observed doesn’t signify any special significance to you as the observer; no, silly, think of it as your observation being another random act which affects the observed particles by interaction, not observation. Observation gives centrality and importance to the observer. Interaction acknowledges you for the insignificant cloud of dust that you really are.
Granted, my take on quantum theory is considerably more bleak, but I would argue, much closer to the truth. Everyone is so quick to mix and match quantum theory to justify whatever they like, giving us quantum-leprechauns and such. But I’m always suspicious of “feel-good” spiritual solutions, especially when they’re supposedly proven by science.
The truth is, when I first read about quantum mechanics, I was amazed by the parallels with Zen Buddhism. Did I jump for joy and start healing people? No. It just affirmed to me that if you look deep enough inside yourself or deep enough outside yourself you’ll find the same thing: nothing. You can paint that to be fuzzy and nice, or you can accept it for what I think it is: terrifying and beautiful.
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03.23.06
Posted in Life at 7:02 pm by Aaron
Well, I’m back in New York after a lightning overnight visit to Toronto, and am now the proud holder of a shiny new visa (the document, not the credit card). After much prepping for my immigration interview, they asked me no questions at all, other than to check if I wanted to keep my old visa as well. This is one case, however, where an anticlimax is more than welcome.
Thanks to Ian for the use of your couch, and to everyone for coming out for drinks. Imagine; friends! What a novelty!!
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03.20.06
Posted in Random at 1:08 pm by Aaron
…I’m older. After all that effort I’ve been putting into aging all year, today I finally get the recognition for it. That’s right, it’s my birthday. The big 2-9.
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03.18.06
Posted in News at 1:58 pm by Aaron
The Beeb had a pretty interesting article today about how the moons Titan and Europa might have been seeded with life from Earth which was kicked off the surface after a massive impact from an asteroid.
Also interesting is the brief appearance in the article of “Captain Understatement”, cape and all.
I think this takes the cake, as far as understatement goes:
“It’s frustrating if you’re a microbe that’s been wandering the Universe for a million years to then die striking the surface of Europa”
Yeah, I’d call that a little frustrating. It’s like hiring a real-estate agent to take you around to look at houses, and having the process get drawn out over a geological time scale. When you find the *perfect* home at long last, the agent accelerates you to 25km/s and you disintegrate upon impact with the Victorian facade. How frustrating.
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Posted in Random at 12:01 pm by Aaron
Some people buy cars as their primary mode of transportation…and then there’s us. We got a stroller!
Thanks to Laura’s grandparents and parents, we are now the proud owners of this little slice of heaven, which, I must say, is the Rolls Royce of baby gear. Sweet!
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03.13.06
Posted in Random at 11:15 am by Aaron
Though al Jazeera gets a lot of slack outside of the Middle East, it deserves some praise for its openness and willingness to tackle prickly issues. Case in point; in this debate which they set up, this Syrian-American woman rails against a cleric…in Arabic. It’s a very interesting diatribe. Link.
See also an article in the New York Times about the fallout of the interview.
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03.12.06
Posted in Random at 6:07 pm by Aaron
Yesterday was an absolutely beautiful day here in New York City, with the sun shining and the temperature getting up around twenty degrees in midtown. Laura and I went for a long stroll in Central Park, listened to some live music before grabbing some food in the Meatpacking District.
Laura’s take on the whole day?
“Well, that’s probably the last time we’ll be doing that for a while.”
Grumpy? Nope! On the contrary. Laura’s officially 32 weeks pregnant as of today, which means that no matter how nice a day it is, her feet are going to explode after walking from 86th to 59th street. That’s just the way it is.
So lets do a little math…32 weeks…out of 40 weeks…dang, that’s nine!
Or that’s the math as far as ‘obstetrics math’ goes. We’re actually “in” the 32nd week. But if you care to try and match 40 weeks (which is how long a pregnancy is) with nine months (which is how long a pregnancy is)…they don’t match up at all. Which is why I’m happy with 40-32=9. I’m comfortable with that.
The funny irony of pregnancy is that the more comfortable I get with it, the less comfortable Laura is. There’s now no denying there’s a small person in Laura’s belly, and the obviousness of it really helps me get it in my head that we’re expecting company. Laura’s known that for a while, of course, and is currently more preoccupied with the fact that she seems to have developed a second centre of gravity (one that kicks her in the ribs).
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03.10.06
Posted in Random at 10:32 am by Aaron
While living in Toronto, I often lamented the poor selection of street food, which seemed to amount only to sausages (referred to lovingly in T.O. as ‘Street Meat’). After seeing Pad Thai as street food in Thailand and, well, just about everything as street food in China, I found myself expecting a little more when I came back to troll Toronto’s street for food.
Enter New York. In my 20 block stroll yesterday I came across some pretty amazing street vendors, the most ridiculously good smelling of which was this one:
Toronto has its street meat, New York has theirs. The real question for me was, “Why don’t we have this?”
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Posted in Nerdy at 12:27 am by Aaron
For reasons I needn’t go into, I’ve been reading through some old essays of mine from university. What’s most amusing about them is the common theme that seems to be between the lines in most of my papers; I’m a nutcase, and a slightly argumentative one, at that. I dug up my final paper in my anthropology in which the concluding paragraph begins with the line “Anthropology drips with irony.” Yes, I decided to criticize and try to refute the entire discipline in summation of what I learned in the course.
But I remembered that essay, as ill-advised as it may seem. What I forgot was the completely loopy essay that I just dug up in one of my fourth year classes: I argued that ergonomics were not – as you might have heard – developed to make people more comfortable, but were actually a form of exploitation.
That’s awesome. Wow. I was really into it at that point! I somehow suspect that what I was actually trying to do by my fourth year was prove that I could argue anything. Check this:
“The mechanization of society, then, has had a profound effect on the place of the human body in relation to its environment. It is insufficient, however, to merely point out that the environment in which the body exists is constructed, for this would be to ignore the ways in which the role of the body is altered by its technological surroundings. While representing the ultimate case of a mechanical black-box whose needs dictate the design of additional component technologies, the body has become a mere cog in a mechanized world. This rationalization of the body is achieved in large part through the application of ergonomic practices, which aim to blur the distinctions between man and machine.”
Later on, when really hitting my stride, I trumpet:
“As such, it must be understood that ergonomics does not represent a deliberate effort to dehumanize labour, but is instead a manifestation of socio-political values being reflected through technological systems.”
I should have been banned from my keyboard and never allowed to say “socio-political” again.
But no essay, for me, was complete without bringing Marx into it…
“To use the Marxist lexicon to define the parameters of the analysis, the focus is upon the ways in which capitalist ideology has shaped the forces of production in order to maximize output, where the ‘forces of production’ encompass the ‘mode of appropriation of nature, that is, to the labour process in which a determinate raw material is transformed into a determinate product.’”
Boo-ya. I’m a nut-job. I would quote more, but the truth is, whenever I started going off about Marx, I started speaking another language that wasn’t quite English. I think my favourite line is this: “Ergonomics is thus the methodological brainchild of capitalist efforts to extract the maximal surplus-value from labour inputs.”
That’s the scary part of the essay for me, because even as I read it now, I find myself nodding to myself and saying, “Well, yeah…I mean strictly speaking, that is true.”
But then, whether surplus-value is being extracted from you or not, it is pretty sweet when you get to sit in one of those Aeron chairs at work…
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03.08.06
Posted in News at 9:41 pm by Aaron
Now I’m just as anxious as the next guy to get a shot in at Bush (hopefully more anxious than Cheney), but I have to say, blocking this port deal seems pretty ridiculous. I can’t believe I agree with The Economist on this one, but they hit the mark in an article this week when they said that Dubai simply has too much to lose to support terrorists.
I also feel that this is a terrible message to be sending to the “Islamic world”, if such a distinction is valid. This is, essentially, saying “We can’t trust you Arabs with our ports, because, well, you’re probably terrorists. Or friends with terrorists.”
So does this mean we should disengage with muslim countries altogether? It seems to me that Dubai is an excellent example of a Middle-Eastern country making a huge effort to liberalise, embrace free markets and “join the fold”; I wouldn’t be surprised if they saw this as the big slap in the face that it is.
Man, if people got that upset over cartoons, I wonder what they’ll think of this.
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Posted in Random at 10:33 am by Aaron
I have – at last – begun the long, slow process of updating my website. My theory that breaking it would force me to fix it seems to have been right, as I’m now motivated to do something to update what was starting to look like a time-capsule from the 90’s.
One thing I realized was that it is going to be a little while before I can implement the fully css’d website that I was hoping for; for now, I’m still putting it together in Dreamweaver. Ah well…better that than no site at all.
For now, check out what I have at www.aaronwilliamson.com. I’d love some feedback or ideas.
What I found really interesting was putting together the little slide show…it was a bit of a head-trip to go through all those photos a remember all that Laura and I have done in the past few years. Pretty fun.
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03.07.06
Posted in Random at 4:55 pm by Aaron
I saw this down on Broad Street today…I swear I didn’t Photoshop this.
This is definitely a sound system not to be outdone. Talk about pimpin’ your ride.
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