Joke Time!

Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar... ...

...and doesn't.

  Schrödinger's cat

Time In Physics

Copenhagen Interpretation   

Wave–particle duality

EPRparadox  

Irving Penn: Obsession de la semaine

Veridical Paradoxes: Playing the Mind Guerrilla

Though I normally attempt to share my ideas, thoughts, and revelations in real time, with real people, I've come to learn that there are some, such as the one you are about to read, which are too obtuse for general conversation, and by this I mean MY general conversation.  Yeah, blows your mind a little doesn't it.  Allow  me to explain:  These said flashes of brilliance (my translation of what Hebb might deem: "increases in synaptic efficacy," or the result thereof) are not without audience, they are merely, if not lamentably, anachronisms -- the passionate conversationalist's l'esprit d'escalier.  Unfortunate casualties of Sir Stephen Hawking's "psychological arrow of time," they fall victim to the human perception of an inexorable passing of time.*  And so, the target audience, whether previously established or otherwise, is very small and proximally (not temporally, one woman's opinion) inaccessible.

However, the lack of an audience could hardly silence me.  So, in the meantime, I shall deposit my comment here.  It goes like this:

I have long since been bothered by many of the philosophical questions posed by Søren Kierkegaard in Either/Or (I'll spare you this tangential minefield, if I ever feel I have the mental energy I'll flesh it out in what is likely to be a three-post series), the front-runner being as follows:

“What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?”

Well, last night I came across The Wall, which I've owned for some time in the Le Mur version but never really read (primarily due to the fact that, although I can go page for page in French with someone reading a book in English, that person would have to be reading a selection from the "my first book" collection at a finger-tracking level).  So I read the eponymous story, which ended, spoiler alert, with this line:

"Everything began to spin and I found myself sitting on the ground: I laughed so hard I cried..."

To put a fine point on this particular amalgamation of thoughts, musings, and pedantries, two things: 

1.) Impress your audience into a state of awe with the precision, detail, and control of technical skill, or shock them into it, with the precision of mischievous skill.  But know that a minor digression spent caviling over semantics, Mr. Kierkegaard, accomplishes neither.

   (full transparency, excerpt below.)    

  "laughter first makes its appearance in the child, it is a nascent

  cry that is excited by pain or a suddenly arrested feeling of pain

  repeated at very short intervals. What if everything in the world

  were a misunderstanding; what if laughter really were tears!"

No Sale. Moving on.

2.) For the more mischievous -- the smirkers; the one-eye-brow lifters; those given to juxtaposition, sarcasm, and irony: There are four (or so) definitions of paradox, but this is the only one that matters: A statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth. (The other three are rendered irrelevant, unless qualified/implied, by the word's own paradoxical definition.)

So I have two words for you: Veridical paradoxes. You're welcome. Now go turn some heads. Shock and awe.


Fun with all things paradox-esque Lewis Carroll on logical paradoxes , Mobius strip, John Barth’s Frame-Tale, Game Theory

*Some fun with the titans of time (Einstein, Godel, Hawking, etc.) in the topics section (See, I care that you had no idea what I was talking about. Mildly. I'd say about a hair above this.)

Full Disclaimer: I found Either/Or an impressionable work and, like I said, maybe someday I'll have the energy to give it the full and thorough critique it (kinda) deserves.

The Grinch...OR The Little Black Heart of the Telephone

I recently expressed to a friend (about an hour ago, if we were to get technical) that I, by the definition Mr. Albert Einstein established, might be insane and should, perhaps, be committed.  To which he replied, "you don't need to be committed, you need to be loved."  Everyone needs to hear such things from time to time (saccharine though they are).  My reply, not dealing well with the saccharine, was a quote from the Grinch (or so I thought): "I think my little heart just grew three sizes." Apparently, however, it reminded him of the following poem.

(Full disclaimer, I am not a fan of poetry - though not quite metrophobic - and my penchant for the written word is less focused on modern writing than say, the days of Mr. Hemingway, or Mr. Eliot even....however, I felt it worthwhile to contribute something that might be of interest to, well, someone else...for a change ;) Enjoy.)

The Little Black Heart of the Telephone

That telephone keeps screaming its little black heart out:

Nobody there? Oh, nobody's there!—and the blank room bleeds

For the poor little black bleeding heart of the telephone.

I, too, have suffered. I know how it feels

When you scream and scream and nobody's there.

I am feeling that way this goddam minute,

If for no particular reason.

Tell the goddam thing to shut up! Only

It's not ringing now at all, but I

Can scrutinize and tell that it's thinking about

Ringing, and just any minute, I know.

So, you demand, the room's not empty, you're there?

Yes, I'm here, but it might start screaming just after

I've gone out the door, in my private silence.

Or if I stayed here I mightn't answer, might pretend

Not to be here at all, or just be part of the blankness

The room is, as the blankness

Bleeds for the little bleeding black heart

Of the telephone. If, in fact, it should scream,

My heart would bleed too, for I know how pain can't find words.

Or sometimes is afraid to find them.

I tell you because I know you will understand.

I know you have screamed: Nobody's there? Oh, nobody's there!

You've looked up at stars lost in blankness that bleeds

Its metaphysical blood, but not for redemption.

Have you ever stopped by the roadside at night, and couldn't

Remember your name, and breath

Came short? Or at night waked up with a telephone screaming,

And covered your head, afraid to answer?

Anyway, in broad daylight, I'm now in the street,

And no telephone anywhere near, or even

Thinking about me. But tonight, back in bed, I may dream

Of a telephone screaming its little black heart out,

In an empty room, toward sunset,

While a year-old newspaper, yellowing, lies on the floor, and velvety

Dust thick over everything, especially

On the black telephone, on which no thumbprint has,

For a long time now, been visible.

In my dream I wonder why, long since, it's not been disconnected.

(from Robert Penn Warren's Now and Then: Poems 1976-1978)

I was meant for the stage...

Not only was I there (Austin City Limits 2007), you can hear me laugh and "woo" at the line:

Mother, please be proud. Father, be forgiving. Even though you told me: "You'll never make a living."

Such is the life of an artiste << wink >>

Day 1 as a published author...

I'll defer to Mr. Hank Rearden on this one:

with the unspoken sentence hanging in the air: “Mr. Rearden, it can't be done” – the meals, interrupted and abandoned at the sudden flash of a new thought, a thought to be pursued at once, to be tried, to be tested, to be worked on for months, and to be discarded as another failure – the moments snatched from conferences, from contracts, from the duties of running the best steel mills in the country, snatched almost guiltily, as for a secret love – the one thought held immovably across a span of ten years, under everything he did and everything he saw, the thought held in his mind when he looked at the buildings of a city, at the track of a railroad, at the light in the windows of a distant farmhouse, at the knife in the hands of a beautiful woman cutting a piece of fruit at a banquet, the thought of a metal alloy that would do more than steel had ever done, a metal that would be to steel what steel had been to iron – the acts of self-racking when he discarded a hope or a sample, not permitting himself to know that he was tired, not giving himself time to feel, driving himself through the wringing torture of: “not good enough…still not good enough…” and going on with no motor save the conviction that it could be done – then the day when it was done

I will, however, add one word to the end: better.  Until then...

Vol 17 Issue 3 signing off.

Hem's reading list

Interestingly enough I just finished a Graham Greene -- The End of the Affair, it had its moments. I should read the book that was originally recommended to me before making a final judgment.  The Quiet American here I come...then I guess, I should see what Hem saw in that particular selection...we shall see.