fractalnavel

yuri gagarin, alan shepherd, neil armstrong - and michael melvill.  i haven't seen much on this latest space pioneer's personal history, but i'm sure it's coming as the media catches up to this historic event.

but i'll be more impressed when they manage an orbital flight.  maybe we need a “y” prize for that.  and then a “z” prize for actually visiting an extraterrestrial body, whether moon, planet, asteroid, whatever.  of course, there are eva's to look forward to, and eventually orbital stations.

interesting to see that a lot of this stuff is on the same schedule as a lot of potential global catastrophes - global warming, fossil fuel supplies, population growth, and so on.  and perhaps along with some of the good stuff - nanotech, genomics, quantum computing, and all that these technologies imply.  surely there will be attendant socio-political-economic upheavals as well. (here's an odd example - what happens when microsoft's original founders die off ?)

so maybe there is an impending techno-social singularity, speculated about by many.  but what form this “singularity” takes is still an open question.  it might be best to think of such things in terms of “relative singularities” only - they are only characterized as such in terms of our current context.  seen from that perspective, previous historical “singularities” are readily recognized.  which leaves open the possibility for preparation and engineering.  this, in turn, belies the original characterization as a singularity.  the mere existence of a mathematical description does not imply physical reality.  anyone familiar with physics will recognize that this last statement is not at all held to be an obvious truth, often quite the contrary.

it seems that those who talk in terms of phase transitions rather than singularities will have a more useful adaptive toolbox at their disposal.

so, that's been decided then. to really have fun, one should attempt to look beyond that critical point for what comes after.  the problem is that such transitions tend to be opaque.  but there are fundamental constraints and absolutes that will remain in place, and other universal principals that enable useful inferences to be drawn about what lies on the other side.  this is the same metaprocess used by cosmologists in their endeavours to understand the nature of the early universe.

so, what can we infer ?  nahh, _you_ tell _me_ - it's more fun that way ;-)

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i had forgotten about this; from last easter ;-)

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one more reason to be careful who we elect as president (as if the usual ones weren't enough):

"It's not just the individual, it's the era they represent," Don Ritchie, associate Senate historian, said in a telephone interview. "When they die, they become statesmen. Their political battles are behind them."

---from a reuters article refering to the reagan funeral

oh, crap - we may have 30-40 years to “look forward to” with george w. representing the u.s. as a “statesman“.  sad but true.

on the other hand, in modern times only carter has effectively played that role in his post presidential years.  so maybe we're safe after all.

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finally “splurged“ on a digi-cam.  as opposed to jon (with his new d70),  i go the cheap route:  a combo digital camera / web cam / video-clip capable thingy - for under $25.  about time i had some sort of image technology here.  it's got a few drawbacks that make it mostly a stay-at-home device - no lcd pic display, volatile memory, and only 8mb at that - but i mostly wanted something cheap for recording items for insurance or sales purposes anyway, and then a web cam for im comms, as needed.  the video clip ability is a bonus.  the lack of an lcd screen makes it difficult to tell when the subject is properly framed - the viewfinder gives no indication of how far off you are in squaring the camera off, so multiple angle shots are needed to be sure one of them is right.  and the volatile memory means that if the batteries go dead before you have a chance to transfer the pics, you lose it all.  so, this is obviously not a trip-quality camera, at least not beyond a weekend, and definitely not for anything considered critical.  and i don't think it has any pda compatible drivers (will the xp ones work on pocket pc?), so tranferring to a pda probably isn't an option.  if that worked, it would make this thing at least acceptable as a roadcam.

meanwhile, here is a portrait of self, hunched over and bangin' away at the keyboard.  i would set this up as a live webcam if i was doing my own hosting.  there are other ways of “publishing” such a live feed, but they're not worth it.  i mean, really - who would be interested in a dustbunny cam anyway ?

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[hey, i should get a chance to create a bad sports headline every now and then too.]

phantom save by lightning steals cup from calgary

as one news report has it:

Calgary almost won it on a power play midway through the third, but Nikolai Khabibulin stuck out his right leg to stop Martin Gelinas' rebound attempt perilously close to the goal line. Multiple TV replays did not conclusively show the puck crossing the line.

"It's got to be conclusive," Sutter said. "I looked at it from two different angles, and unless they have a different one, you can't say that it's a goal.

"We reviewed a number of camera angles and only one showed the puck," NHL director of hockey operations Colin Campbell said. "From that angle, it was inconclusive whether the puck crossed the goal line... there was insufficient evidence."

what a load of crap.  funny how they have half a dozen or more ways to view the goal, used all the time, but on that play we were shown only two.  and in one of the shots, you could see the full disc of the puck flat against the ice, with about half to three-quarters of a puck width of white ice between it and the goal line - inside the line !  as the camera goes on to show, the puck rebounds off the goalie's right pad - again, clearly inside the net.  now, unless the goalie was waving his leg around in the air above himself in some anatomically impossible position, there is no way for that image of puck inside the goal to be illusory.  imbeciles.

what really happened is a screw up in the officiating process, not so much on the ice, as those officials obviously did not and likely could not have seen the play, but in the communications process that a review was underway.  play should have been stopped until they were finished, and clearly there was no announcement until _after_ the chance to reverse the call was past.  so, with the problem having already irreversibly occurred, they instead try and cover it up.

the ballsy thing to have done would have been to admit the error, but i'm not sure what that would mean practically, given the rules.  what a debacle (where's howard cosell when you need him?).  anyway, i consider the rest of the stanley cup finals to be merely exhibition play from this point on.  in reality, calgary won the cup by the end of regulation time in game six, and the ot's and game seven were unnecessary.  and in the sports books, please, let's have a _big_ one of these if tampa bay “wins” it:

*

lord stanley should be rolling in his grave.

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tuesday is 30¢ wing night at bw³.  bw³ has twelve different flavored sauces.  wings are sold in batches of six.  12 × 6 × $0.30 = $21.60 for 72 wings.  oh yeah, i did it.  problem 1: the wings have outlasted the beer.  problem 2: don't order 6 dozen hot wings when you only have a half roll of toilet paper in the house.

and some people were expecting quantum mechanics.  this'll fix 'em ;-)

besides, it's not the qm that's interesting so much as its philosophical interpretation.  some people call that “physics” - descriptive phenomenology without the mathematics.  but it's really just nonrigorous philosophizing.

those who know better will recognize the similarities between the first and third paragraphs in this post.

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