It's about time

I figured that, despite the fact I really should get some sleep in anticipation of work tomorrow, I needed to catch up a bit on my New Yorker reading. Because they don't have the New Yorker Down South. And it's the food issue, which should be great, so I started reading a bit of the Talk of the Town, which I assume everyone reads anyway so I normally wouldn't bother mentioning in TWitNY. But given my commitment to blogging all things time-related as well as almost fatalistic obsession with determinism, I thought I needed to excerpt the following:

For us believing physicists, the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one. … On top of that, Einstein was a determinist--the outcome of everything is already knowable."

Then it goes on to briefly mention quantum theory, which does throw a monkey wrench in things, but not in a way that's remotely useful to proponents of free will. But anyway.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Beep Beep Beep Beep, Yeah!

Cars are scary. They're big steel machines of doom. I do not trust that a car I operate won't just stop working as a drive it. I fear running over nails. I fear psycho people in lanes next to me losing their minds and making sharp turns of their steering wheels to crash into me...for no reason. No one (aside from Jeff) at all understands my fear of driving. Not just, "driving at night is a little creepy." We're talking nightmares. Every bad dream I have that I can remember involves me operating a vehicle careening out of control. Me driving a vehicle without brakes. Having to merge into traffic and not being able to maneuver the steering wheel. I drove a bit growing up (living in a Florida suburb, you kind of had to), but unlike the majority of my friends, I didn't have my own car. So I borrowed my parents' cars when necessary, to drive to and from my house and my buddies' houses, the mall, Borders, Friday's, and back home. I was terrified of chang...
Read more

In which I blog again, however briefly

Blogging has been sporadic at best (and postively tubercular at worst) throughout the past weeks as I haven't had much of an Internet connection. Now I do have much of an Internet connection, but only because I am at Ryan and Sarahs's home in Boston for the weekend, and they were kind enough to have a cable modem that doesn't suck. I've posted some nerd-phone photos of my trip on the Flickr side of things, and the basic gist is that I'm having a nice time with two of my favourite people. If anyone out there happens to work for Verizon and would like to set me up for DSL back in Brooklyn, I think I'm ready.
Read more

The Colorless Wonder

The oddest thing that I’ve gathered about Jeff (so far…I’m assuming there’s a lot more there) is that he is without any distinct color. No, I’m not talking about his colorBLINDness and color CLUELESSness, although that’s fascinating. (He really doesn’t know his colors. Try him some time. I said “chartreuse” or “magenta” the other day and he was all, “how can you possibly know what those mean!?!”) Jeff’s name, when it pops up in my mind or in my e-mail Inbox, does not take on a color of its own. And that’s weird for me. Because I spent the better part of my only-child-dom with either a book or my Crayola box of 64, when I see letters or numbers, my brain automatically links them with a distinct color. (This is, of course, a self-diagnosis.) The experts call this “condition” synesthesia . I don’t think I have the full-blown deal. Hardcore folks look at a page of text and see a rainbow in front of their eyes. Other sysenthites see colors when they hear certain tones, or vice versa. It’s a...
Read more