Of Songs and People

There are certain songs out there that remind me of certain people. I was just listening to the music on my IRiver, and I caught one that always reminds me of my wife, and I'm not sure why. The song is Chez Seychelles, by Michael Doucet and Beausoleil. Its old-timey, and its a fiddle song, and I heard it at our wedding, but its something more than that. Its sweet, and simple, and homey, and happy. In my mind, I can picture us in early 19th century costumes waltzing to this song, and being very very happy. Some days when I hear this song, I even get choked up.

There are other songs that I associate with her, such as "Summertime", as sung by Ella Fitzgerald. I associate this song with her because early on in our courtship, I was at her apartment, and heard a tune coming from the living room, and there she was, quietly hand sewing something, and singing Summertime. She's got a lovely voice, I wish she used it more often. On that day, she looked up and saw me looking around the corner at her, and she was very embarrassed. Little things like that remind me how special she is, and I suppose Chez Seychelles does that as well, but I can't pin down why it does, it doesn't have the same kind of direct link that Summertime does.

I associate Cold Beverages by G Love and Special Sauce to my old roommate and good friend Matt, he introduced me to the Philadelphonic sounds, and many a hot summer day were spent in the blue Subaru going to and fro, listening to G Love or A Tribe Called Quest.

Unfortunately, I can't think of any others right now, but I know there are others. Another interesting phenomenon I suffer from is music-induced memories. It might not sound very interesting, but when I hear certain songs, I think to times or places that I heard them in. "Well, duh," you say, "That happens to everyone." But its not the typical "Oh, I was at so and so's house when I heard that" business. It happens the most when I hear songs that I was listening to while reading on the T. I remember the book, I remember the scene, I remember the weather, and I get a distinct remembrance of my feelings at the time, even those not associated with the book or with the song. I've told some people about this, and they attest that they've had the same thing happen to them, and we generally attribute it to a subliminal-type trigger, that our brains and senses remember more when more of them are in use, or when concentrating on something like reading a book.

I'm reminded of a story from Richard Feynman,(noted physicist and one of my heroes) who, while in college, did a study with his friends. Loosely put, he noticed that his friends thought and processed thought differently than he did. This may seem obvious, but its still an interesting study if you ask me. He asked his friends to silently count out what they thought was a minute while doing different things, including reading a book, talking, typing, walking up and down stairs, playing an instrument, etc. He found that while he was able to read a book and count at the same time, his friends had a hard time doing the same, while on the other hand, they were able to talk and count at the same time, but Richard had a very difficult time doing so. He posited that it came down to how a person counts. Some people said they count by seeing the numbers in their head, to others it was a kind of beat in their head, and others spoke the numbers to themselves. Try it yourself some time. Count to 60 doing different activities, and see which takes the longest and is the most difficult to you. I find it easy to count while listening to something else, but I have a very hard time counting while reading or writing something I've never read before. If I type something off of a page, I don't have any problems, though.

Once again, I've ended somewhere completely different than where I started off, or even where I intended to go, but life's all about the journey and not the destination, eh?

I think Feynman would tend to agree with me.

Blog Zero?

I found myself in an interesting state of mind today. I found out that one of my favorite blogs to visit is authored by a very Christian person. He goes to Christian rock concerts, his kids go to bible school, he does a lot of Christian web sites, and so on. Now, I grew up Catholic, and I generally believe that what a person believes is their own business. At the same time, I hate preachy types. If you're Catholic, Christian, Jewish, Mormon, Pagan, Buddhist, Atheist or whatever, I don't want to be converted. The more you try to force me to be something, the more I'm going to resist.

Back to the blog. The author isn't a preachy type, at least in his blog, and I find this to be good, and refreshing for someone who seems to be such a staunch Christian. The difficult part is that I saw one of his web pages that he did for a pro-life group, which bothered me.

I'm not sure why I'm put aback by the revelation that someone is very religious, especially very Christian. For pete's sake, my mother was almost a nun! Maybe its because it often is followed by a certain kind of inability to be accepting of others and people with other views.(something that my mother has no problem with, she loves everyone, including the psycho, evil, heartless girlfriends I've had in the past(until they broke up with me(which was somtimes my fault) and broke my heart(i just added that last bit to mess with more parenthesis))) And with staunch Christianity often comes a militant rejection of the possibility of gay rights and pro-choice rights. I think that's why I dig the Unitarians so much, they are welcoming of everyone, as long as they're kind and welcoming of others themselves. Its a friendly, warm atmosphere, and even anti-social me enjoyed their coffee socials. Sure, I was still a little uncomfortable, but I was more at ease than normal.

I know plenty of pagans, and I'm happy that most of them are accepting of others, and their views, because I've also met pagans that are as hard-core as any Christian, and as anti-Christian as any Christian is anti-pagan. Tolerance is the key to me, and I think that should be the message at the core of every religion. Some are more geared towards this idea, such as Buddhism, others aren't. Islam, ironically, is geared towards tolerance and equality, at least in the teachings of Mohammed. Like any religion, his teachings have been skewed to match the views of the ruling group, and now many people think of Islam as the most intolerant religion around.

And don't get the wrong idea that I dislike people being religious. I think I've made that clear here, but in case I haven't, I have no problem with people celebrating their faith, as long as they've consciously looked at what their religion is putting forth, and believe in it, or believe in enough of it to follow. I took a good look at Catholicism, and I decided that I couldn't call myself part of a church that held the views that the Catholic church does. Do I still uphold some Catholic ideas? Sure, but in no way would I call myself Catholic. There's a pagan I know that is afraid that whenever she practices her religion, I'll be offended or I'll rebuke her for believing in something bigger than herself. I have to keep telling her that I'm not that way, that she can believe what she wants, and she can practice the way that she wants, as long as she truly understands why she believes what she does, even if that reason is "it makes me happy and more at peace".

Back to the blog, again, and my reactions to finding out that the author is big time Christian. I guess that I just have to push through the disappointment that I feel in finding out some of his views, and accept that he is the way he is, like I ask everyone else to do. After all, he's not advocating on his blog for anti-abortion anti-gay marriage laws, so what should it matter to me? On the other hand, he probably supports and votes for politicians that are in favor of such laws. Its a fine, fuzzy line. Either way, until he starts putting it into his blog, I doubt that I'll let it affect me that much, I'll just note it, and add it to the things I know about him, and realize that those views may affect other views that are seemingly unrelated.

I hate the circus and the Ice Capades(Bruins Blog 1)

And not for the reason most would. No, I hate Barnum & Bailey's and Disney on Ice/Ice Capades not for their treatment of animals, not for the clowns, not for the horrible dance numbers, nor the thousands of plague-infested rug rats infesting the events,(all valid reasons) but for their schedule. Their schedule puts one or the other in Boston for the beginning two weeks of October. Why should this matter? It puts my beloved Bruins on the road for two weeks at the beginning of the season, that's why.

For pretty much as long as I can remember, the B's have started off on the road. This has several bad effects on the team, which I will go into briefly. First off, the team's on the road for an extended time, which is demoralizing, tiring, and can really wear a team down. Secondly, its at the beginning of the season, which means that team chemistry often takes a hit because there's no time to rest, no time to congeal, and no practices at home to help make the team better as a team. This year's Bruins have suffered from this quite a bit, having no sense of cohesion at all, and have started off with a 1-3-1 record.(fine, 1-3-0-1, its still 3 points in 5 games) Thirdly, or maybe Secondly part two, the beginning of the season means that the other teams are having their home openers, which apart from the playoffs, are often the most anticipated games of the season, faces fresh and new, hopes high, and thoughts awash with Lord Stanley's Cup. For the Bruins and their fans, it consistently means being the bad guy for 2 weeks, the black hatters, often with a greatly reduced chance simply because they're on the road on an opening night. Fourthly, it hurts the Bruins because by the time they HAVE come home, its mid-October, and the hockey newbies just don't care aboot the season anymore. Add to that a more losses than wins, and the mood is more somber than it should be when they're finally home.

The Bruins are not going to be good this year. Some are picking them to make the playoffs in the 5-8 slot, which last year meant 92-101 points. I doubt they'll make it at all. Its early, but the chemistry isn't there yet, and they're mainly a young team with a few exceptions, including Glen Murray, PJ Axelsson, and Tim Thomas. I like Phil Kessel, I like the addition of Zdeno Chara, I love Patrice Bergeron, and I can't say that they have any slackers like they did last year in the likes of Alexei Zhamnov. They're just young or inexperienced, and have to take some time to get together as a team. Do I think Hannu has the goods to be a number 1 goalie? Sure, he's young, only 22, and has good fundamentals. As sad as it is to say, I'm in favor of ditching this year. Trade Glen Murray to a cup-worthy team for some young guns and maybe a young defenseman or some room under the cap, not that I'm expecting such genius from Harry's Gang.

I'm pretty disgusted with the managerial moves since the end of the lockout, but its nothing new compared to the last 20 years. They poised the team to have a lot of contracts end the year before the lockout, in anticipation, and that worked wonderfully, giving them the lowest salary cap going into the lockout, poising them to snap up some real talent that other teams simply couldn't afford any more. Instead, they got washed up and tired old hags that were selfish and had no team dynamic. This lead to a listless Glen Murray and a early-season crumble that lead to the unexplainable trade of Joe Thornton. I'm not going to get into it deeply in this post, but I was okay with the thoughts of trading Jumbo Joe, he tended to hang onto the puck too much in the corners, waiting for Murray to get open in front of the net. He just didn't seem to fit in Boston, and as much as I loved him, I was willing to see him move on, provided the B's got back something decent in return, like a Ilya Kovalchuck or Danny Heatley. Nope. They get three nickels for a quarter, Marco Sturm, Brad Stuart, and Wayne friggin Primeau. Next, they trade away Samsonov, and end up in the cellar.

My predictions for the team is 25-45-6-6, for a final point total of 62 dismal points, and 2nd worst in the standings, the lowest being godawful Phoenix. They're in a tough division, they look like crap, and they can't gel.

Chaos theory, and why its full of crap.

This post is to continue on the mention I made earlier about humanity's propensity towards self-centeredness with regards to chaos theory, as it relates to the physical world.(self-centrism sounds much cooler, but its not a real word) Chaos theory was first brought to the general public by Michael Chrichton and Jurassic Park, where that freakishly tall knob, Jeff Goldblum, explains chaos theory by dripping water down the back of whatshername's hand, stating that the path can not be predicted because of subtle movements in her hand, her pulse, etc. For you more technical types, here's the definition of chaos theory from wikipedia:

For a dynamical system to be classified as chaotic, most scientists will agree that it must have the following properties:

• it must be sensitive to initial conditions,
• it must be topologically mixing, and
• its periodic orbits must be dense.

Sensitivity to initial conditions means that each point in such a system is arbitrarily closely approximated by other points with significantly different future trajectories. Thus, an arbitrarily small perturbation of the current trajectory may lead to significantly different future behavior.

Sensitivity to initial conditions is popularly known as the "butterfly effect", suggesting that the flapping of a butterfly's wings over Tokyo might create tiny changes in the atmosphere, which could over time cause a tornado to occur over Texas. The flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of events leading to large-scale phenomena. Had the butterfly not flapped its wings, the trajectory of the system might have been vastly different.

Sensitivity to initial conditions is often confused with chaos in popular accounts. It can also be a subtle property, since it depends on a choice of metric, or the notion of distance in the phase space of the system. For example, consider the simple dynamical system produced by repeatedly doubling an initial value (defined by the mapping on the real line from x to 2x). This system has sensitive dependence on initial conditions everywhere, since any pair of nearby points will eventually become widely separated. However, it has extremely simple behavior, as all points except 0 tend to infinity. If instead we use the bounded metric on the line obtained by adding the point at infinity and viewing the result as a circle, the system no longer is sensitive to initial conditions. For this reason, in defining chaos, attention is normally restricted to systems with bounded metrics, or closed, bounded invariant subsets of unbounded systems.

Even for bounded systems, sensitivity to initial conditions is not identical with chaos. For example, consider the two-dimension torus described by a pair of angles (x,y), each ranging between zero and 2π. Define a mapping that takes any point (x,y) to (2x, y + a), where a is any number such that a/2π is irrational. Because of the doubling in the first coordinate, the mapping exhibits sensitive dependence on initial conditions. However, because of the irrational rotation in the second coordinate, there are no periodic orbits, and hence the mapping is not chaotic according to the definition above.

Topologically mixing means that the system will evolve over time so that any given region or open set of its phase space will eventually overlap with any other given region. Here, "mixing" is really meant to correspond to the standard intuition: the mixing of colored dyes or fluids is an example of a chaotic system.

I don't even care about the second two points, because, much like many mathematical theories, the first point of chaos theory falls apart when applied to real life, specifically nature. There are patterns everywhere in nature, and yes, they may seem chaotic to us, but they usually have some sort of symmetry and balance and an underlying system. Here are some examples, using some of the famous "butterfly effect" examples:

A butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo and a tornado happens in Texas, eventually. Why? Because the butterfly changing the miniscule amount of air around it causes the weather patterns to change, therefore creating a massively energetic meteorological phenomenon half a world away. Bull. Crap. That butterfly's wing flap injects a tiny amount of force and energy on to the surrounding environment. This energy is diffused, dampened, and scattered into relative nothingness within a few seconds by my friend and yours, entropy. The butterfly flapping its wings doesn't matter because compared to the massive amounts of energy coming in from other sources, namely the sun and moon and earth's core, the energy expelled by Mr. butterfly is nothing. Negligible. Irrelevant. In the big scheme of things, it changes nothing.

Perhaps a more concrete example is dropping a pebble in a pond, another popular chaos theory "lets bring it to the masses" example. Again, this is in nature, and again, it doesn't hold up. Dropping a pebble in a pond causes ripples. This is true. The ripples extend out radially. Also true. But if you stood on the other side of the pond, you could not detect that a pebble has been dropped way across the pond, now could you? No. Once again, its is because the energy diffuses, takes other forms, bounces off of a bank and is absorbed as impact, and so on and so forth. In fact, I'm looking out at sailboats and motorboats that are leaving wakes, sizeable wakes, in the harbor, and those waves are not even making an impact on the water close to me. Yes, the water close to me is exhibiting signs of disturbance, but much more from the big tankers and wind than any 20 foot sailboat cruising along. Is it detectable? Maybe, but that 20 ft sailboat, for the sake of predictions, can easily be ignored. Which brings me to my next point, size comparisons and total sample.

The previous two examples were both examples of a very small effect on a very large system. The small effect can usually be ignored in a large system. That brings us to the example used in Jurassic Park. That system was one drop, falling down a hand that may be what, 4 or 5 inches(10 cm) long, max? The changes in environment on the hand, namely veins pulsing, hand twitching, are miniscule to us, but not to the environment they are considered in. To the whole environment(the hand) they are what, 1:1000? (assuming a 1/10 mm twitch or pulse) And to the actual moving object, the drop of water, we're talking 1:5, maybe 1:10. If you dropped a 1 foot wide rock in a 1000 foot wide pond, you'll be able to detect it across the pond. Or, in the butterfly case, you'd need a Mothra the size of Virginia to make a difference. An average hurricane delivers 10^14, or 100000000000000 Watts of energy per day, or 200 times the total energy production capability of mankind. To say this can be changed by something as small as a butterfly flapping its wings half a world away is ludicrous.

This all brings me to what I think is the real failing of the butterfly effect, which is man's general self centeredness. Man tends to like to think he makes a difference in his surrounding world, and in a sense, this is true. Man can have an effect on his neighborhood, his town, possibly his state, and maybe even his country. Powerful people can affect the world of man. However, even the most powerful person in the world can not truly affect the Earth, let alone the solar system or galaxy. Even if every nuclear bomb was set off simultaneously, the earth, while devastated, would recover eventually, given enough time. Would it change? Yes, but in the grand astronomical scheme of things, nothing would change. Earth would continue to be a mostly water covered planet 93 million miles from its parent star. And it would still be able to sustain life. Meager at first, but eventually the earth would return to human-habitable status.

The butterfly effect supports this theory of "even the littlest change can have an effect". In reality, the littlest change often means nothing, and gets swallowed up and forgotten by the larger, more important changes.

How's that for a cheery outlook?