encoded notions

Upgrade to wordpress 1.5 in progress. Commenting has been disabled.

[Edit: 10:42pm] Upgrade complete. I like the new dashboard. Comments are reenabled.

Did you ever notice that most of the time within a parking lot region there are fewer pine trees and more deciduous trees? Is it because of the snow that piles up in parking lots during the winter? From personal experience I know that a lot of heavy, icy snow tends to bend and even break branches on the needlier trees. Perhaps it is because pine trees are more conical—wider at the bottom and they would interfere with traffic patterns.

If you do see pine trees in or around a parking lot, they are either 6+ feet away from any concrete or they have the first 8 vertical feet of their branches pruned.

Do we just live in the now—in the vacuity between those fleeting moments that hang together to form our individual timelines? Is all of humanity expressed in these infinitesimally short blips of time?

Humanity is that term so often used in stories about alien invasions and robotic uprisings. The visceral, physical, messy, organic nature of our very operation and interaction. Illogical choices. Love. Hate. Laughter. Reproduction. Sleep. All the things that keep us from solely wearing the label of Information Producers. The things that we feel associate more directly to that ever-elusive concept of life.

Mathematics, spaceflight, transistors, The Internet, cloning, prescription drugs, solvents, quantum mechanics, the electron microscope, and so many other wonderful things. All of this human achievement is so mysteriously devoid of any apparent humanity.

They say that you should live life as if every moment is your last, but if that were true, would any progress ever be made? With that kind of driving force in your life, you’d probably stop caring about the future and focus entirely on the present and personal gratification. So it seems to be a trade-off: progress vs. humanity. But, what if the argument is not as simple as I make it sound?

Researchers in a laboratory are not machines. They interact, they have lives, they even go out for lunch. Elements of humanity are like ghosts, filling the gaps between more notable events. But, over time the humanity averages out leading you to think that perhaps the local effects are seemingly negligible. The same premise applies in quantum mechanics vs. chemistry and in chemistry vs. biology. The little niggling details of the former can be smoothed over in analysis by the latter—most of the time. Other times, those niggling details can blow up and assume control of the situation entirely.

So, most of the time, the day-to-day human interaction balances out so that it really makes no effect on the global state of human achievement. But then there’s that day when an assortment of Ph.D.’s go out to a bar. Over a couple of drinks, they get to chatting about their respective fields and they come to some realization about how the world works that none would have seen on their own.

Humanity is not always a negligible factor—it’s coupled to everything we do. It is what we do, the progress we make is just a side-affect. If that’s true, then maybe we shouldn’t always be so explicitly focused on making progress. To plan for progress, you look to the future; if you always look forwards, you’ll miss the moments as they pass by—and those are the moments which matter the most on both a local and a global scale.

This might be a little rambly…

It takes time and experience to give proper value to things in our lives. When you were a child, tangibility and immediacy were important. Christmas was about the gifts you would play with for a month or two. Though without those gifts, our imaginations would not have developed in quite the same way. Children are also happier, because they lack what causes a lot of unhappiness in people: worry. Deadlines and appointments cause us worry. Dread is just another more serious form of worry.

Tests, grading, homework, applications, health.

Strangely enough, little kids don’t watch the news. And what is one of the primary topics of discussion on the news? Impending doom, freak accidents, people in trouble, deaths, murders, fires, everday things that could happen to us. It makes us worry. Watching/reading about the news is a lot like reading about history before it’s had a chance to be filtered by the passage of time.

It’s also amusing that they say worry takes years off of you life, because it takes years of your life to start worrying. It’s like our lifespan decreases with time.

Worrying is also a lot like forecasting. We think about all the things that could go wrong, so we can plan accordingly. But life is too complex, and the number of things that could go wrong greatly outnumber the number of things that could go right.

I had to physically remove the part of WordPress that handles trackbacks because I couldn’t send them to hell with the simplistic comment-wrangling plugins I have installed right now. All of a sudden a wave of about 30 trackbacks started pouring into the moderate list and I didn’t want to wake up and find that some had slipped through.

Until version 1.5 of WordPress comes out, I think I’m going to leave the trackback functions out of my system.