fractalnavel

so the people who were on vacation last week have returned.  and suddenly, unexpectedly, it's a let down.  no longer center stage, is part of it.  and i think it was never really recognized what i was accomplishing for them.  not that they're not appreciative, because they are.  as evidenced by the continuing payments, if nothing else.  but i suspect this will end soon.

which is kind of wishy washy for me to feel, since in some sense i don't want to do this long term, yet in some senses it's kind of fun.  and i also know that the character of the engagement changes after ninety days or so, with me getting somewhat bored or whatever.  sure is nice to work just down the street though.

they have a position they need to fill, and sometimes i think they were sort of considering me to fill it, but then perhaps not, it seems.  and oh well, i've been honest and myself and if they think that's not a fit, fine. 

so i wonder - is there ever really a fit for me ?  not like for most folks, no.  i do like to do the consulting thing, and at a higher level than i usually get a chance, and i can deliver great value that way.  but it always seems that i'm coming from very far out of left field for most people; they just are not ready for what i have to offer, even if it can give them immediate benefits.

i just was not expecting to feel this way.  odd.  so here i write, a little bummed.  perspective is all i need; i knew i was going to get into this pretty intensely.

i have learned that my skills are hardly rusty at all, and that i am damn good at what i do.  that should be in italics and bold, no kidding.  i've got more breadth and depth than most folks even aim for.  and i'm not really out of touch with the technology, oddly enough.  it did look as if things had been fairly stable the last few years, and it appears that perception was accurate.

so, time to update that resume.  this is actually pretty fun stuff to do, when the industry isn't collapsing or there is some other fear for one's livelihood.

sigh.  next.

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so there was a bit of an ice-fall overnight, you know, the freezing rain that coats things & makes them pretty - and sometimes break.  no breaks around here (although i did have to patch up the back porch awning due to a branch that fell sometime in the last couple of weeks - fiberglass is amazing stuff).

i noticed the wires out front with their ice coating, and numerous little icicles suspended from them.  kind of reminded me of histograms.  or those “how many bars” commercials of that cell phone company.  but looking at them a little longer, there seemed to be a certain distribution of sizes and locations.  there's not much curve to these particuaar hanging wires, or else i suppose there would have been an overall distribution of average lengths due to water flowing to lower parts.  a sort of modulation effect.

of course, irregularities would significantly affect these considerations, as a glance at the ice on the neighboring pines easily confirms.  and i suppose length of growth period and and distribution of water source also affects the overall distribution.  think of the season-long growth of ice that occurs in cold wet areas - like northern michigan.

but to understand such things, one needs to go the opposite direction and consider simplified systems rather than all the complexities that can be present (although recognizing the complexities or perturbing factors allows them to be eliminated).  so what about ice hanging off of uniform lines in a uniform mist of water ?  well, there's gravity, and the line itself, which provide added complexity.  ok, what about uniform mists of supercooled water in zero-g ?  at this point the forces present are only thermal motion (think brownian), the negligible inter-droplet gravitation, and molecular forces - surface tension.  so then the task is to characterize the subsequent formation of water globules over time, and describe this in terms of entropy, among other things.

and it occurs to me - this must have been very similar to the formation of the universe, in principal, if not in the particulars.  does a uniform distribution represent a high or low entropic state ?  what about the subsequent aggregation of particles ?  relative to what baseline ?  are not all arrangements an expression of order, whether the individuals are distinguishable or not ?

and this is what we are.

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i use a dotted date notation most of the time these days (2005.12.03), and it occurred to me how messy these mixed base numbers are, especially when you consider time as well.  yyyy.mm.dd hh:mm:ss.hh - that's base10.base12.base30sortof base24:base60:base60.base10.  now, there's no particular reason why we can't use a fully base10 time of day (what people associate with “metric”), but the year.month.day relations are determined by the particular characteristics of our astronomical reality.  weeks are an interesting anomaly in themselves, an interesting historical accident of the arrangement of the local system combined with our evolving sensory (what we can see), social (when calendars became important) and neural processes.

the use of base10 in the first place is associated with the physical reality of our anatomy, or at least that's how the reasonably credible story goes.

ultimately, our preferences to preserve anachronisms is purely arbitrary.  there is no objective reason to maintain such (outside of considerations of the operation of a mechanistic universe, of course).  in an artificial environment disconnected from the chance arrangements of physics there's no reason we can't construct our temporal relations as we best see fit.

and the fit is determined by our evolutionary history, and so here we are.  perhaps someday - or somewhere - the fit will be different.

i, for one, think that using an astronomical year as the basis for many non-seasonal business dealings is pretty burdensome and downright annoying.  like filing taxes.  can't we disconnect this from the earth's orbit and the state of vegetation ?  why not file every five years ?  or every 100 days ? an objective analysis of economic optimization would likely result in something entirely different - although it might remain the same for farmers, etc.

and yet the results of objectivity must consider specific instantiations of subjective reality.  which kind of starts me thinking about an old project - prime free or other artificial numbering or metrics, designed with specific features only.  ideally, these would not be isomorphic to existing systems.  a disconnected category ?  and can unexpected features be prevented - ie, eliminate emergence ?

and what about numeric representations ?  a sequence of modular arithmetic applied to coefficients of polynomials in base x_i.  surely we can do better than that.  so much of our perceptions and conceptions are controlled by the distinctions we do - and do not - make.  what of a represenation-free mathematics ?

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... finding an overridable method on a base class that solves a week's worth of work and a slew of political problems in one swell foop.

ba-da bing !

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