to illustrate what i mean, take a piano. any piano. then pick a key on that piano and hit it with some amount of force, and hold the note for an arbitrary amount of time. there, you've composed a bit of music. a very simplistic bit of music, but it'll serve.

now repeat the experiment above, but this time adding another tone—either in parallel or in series—again arbitrarily. the complexity of our musical composition has increased by some factor due to the larger number of options (number of piano keys, plus the volume and duration of the incremental tone) we have added with the additional strike.

continue in this manner, evaluating with each additional strike of the keys whether the piece (a) continues to build toward, or (b) has achieved a "sufficiently artistic" (definition t.b.d.) end. if neither, alter something about what you've done or add a new note. if (a), repeat. if (b), halt. see? it's an algorithm (emphasis on the 'rithm' OMG LOL).

you must agree with me that there is some theoretical maximum human endurance for absorption—four hours? ish?—of a single musical work, no matter its beauty, and given the limits of the number of keys available on a standard piano (most have just the eighty-eight), of human fingers both in quantity (most have just the ten) and in key-striking speed measured in notes per second (fifty at a sprint? shot in the dark). also, we must assume that to human ears there is neither an uncountably infinite spectrum of volumes (you can't tell the difference between 76.393 dB and 76.394 dB no matter who you are, you pretentious audiophile) nor an uncountably infinite spectrum of tone durations (ibid., 38.08 ms and 38.09 ms).

if you grant me my assumptions, it follows that the theoretical number of works of music that can be composed is countable, which is to say, given a sufficiently long amount of time and a sufficiently large amount of humans willing to slog through them, we'll write them all. sooner or later, any interesting tune you can hum will have already been composed, and you'll be in violation of someone's copyright.

the world is small only in comparison with such things as the rest of the galaxy, which is itself only small in comparison with such things as the local supercluster. we're to the point in our development as a thinking species where we can observe objects that emitted some bits of light near the beginning of the universe, and the light is only now reaching us. and light is fast, dig? if my calculations are correct it takes light approximately one year to go one light-year; do you know how long it would take you, even taking the entire journey at the fastest speed any human has ever gone? beyond the scope of supercluster one could take two, maybe three meaningful (however gargantuan) steps up, and half a dozen or more on the way down. we live near the bottom, and on the scale to which we are accustomed, the world is pointedly—almost arrogantly—large.

thank you for following so far; it's important you understand where i'm coming from if you're to understand where i'm going. it's a matter of using the appropriate scale. though it's not saying much, the difference between (1) the immensity and permanence of the rock we're all floating on and (2) my own unimportance and brevity is more than the meat between my ears can process. and yet it is precisely this difference that made each bite of greek food, each sight of stacked ancient marble, each step taken on age-worn stone, each smile on the face of the girl i love—all so small when taken individually—so large when viewed through the lens of what i'm used to.

this is what i learned: we're each so small, and each so temporary, but because of this each moment and every inch we have just becomes that much more meaningful. where we are, everything matters except you. you are exactly as self-important as you think you are; it is just your scale that is wrong.

i'm sorry, what was your question? … 'how was greece?'

pretty frakking swell.

the empyrean, by john frusciante. if you can afford it, buy it; if not, beg/borrow/steal it.

this album is style with substance, effing sublime, and—as he claims—is best served loudly in a dark room.

it is time for an unordered noun list.

• greek food!
• greek food. i mean, seriously
• ouzo?!
• inbred kittehs
• long hikes and almost-sunburns
• siestas
• ingenious monks
• culture, and history and stuff
• a healthy dose of perspective

ahem. w.r.t. this last. the world is enormous, beautiful, and full of everything. i just can't even begin to explain the immensity of what i feel. it's like this: take the biggest deepest breath you can, force the air in till your lungs hurt from it, and then in your utter engorgement imagine how much air there is left in the sky. the most you can contain is nearly enough to rupture you, and yet is absolutely nothing.

more soon.

i have this thing—this … this condition, if you will—one of the symptoms (though whether this is a symptom or the disease itself is possibly a matter of debate, but i'll leave that alone) of which is that i am not a big-picture person. i understand things by breaking them down into bits as small as possible, and comparing these smashed-up tiny bits against what i already know. it's quite an involved process and i'll spare you the details, mostly because i don't know them. save us both some time and just label me a deductive reasoner; it's a shortcut but it'll do for our purposes.

i'm getting to the point. the above-referenced album by my uncle roger is what they call a 'concept album,' and follows a meandering—and at times, apparently aimless—path, by assumption: it models the dreams of a married middle-aged man, in real time.

under this assumption, it's no surprise that the entire album is disjointed, incomprehensible, and apparently aimless. but only when you consider the parts, independently of the whole. seriously: read the lyrics for the entire album, and you'll see what i mean. but the whole! ah, the whole. as the last track clicked into place for the first time, i was actually close to crying. actually misty-eyed. for the first time, i saw the world as the other half saw it. and yes, i'm talking about you, you bizarre opaque inductive types.

i'm still getting to the point. as opposite as my brain and this album apparently are, i love it, and cannot get enough of it. everything i am, it is not, and vice versa. maybe this is a case of opposites attract? i can't figure it out.

the point is this: i have no bloody idea what the point is; i just want you to listen to the album, and maybe you'll understand me one quantum more.


p.s. the first ninety seconds of track two. i implore you, go forth, trusting me, into the musical bliss that awaits you.

'to knowledge your knowledge, you will deal equally with everything within your cipher, which gives birth to wisdom that is showing and proving. everything is everything, which equals one. equality gives birth to wisdom, and mathematics do not lie.'


i cannot tell if the above was a submission that went through a translation bot first, or if someone, somewhere, sought to convey meaning with precisely this string of words. i've been thinking about this lately—the relationship between words and meaning (we in the industry actually call it semantics)—for various reasons. one such reason is my wife, who is now engaged in a fight to the death with a master's rhetoric program; you would not believe the depth and reach of some of the books in her pile right now, and on the most abstruse topics. another such reason is this collection of goods, any one of which takes frakking forever to compose, takes away the easy option of just saying what i mean, and makes me think directly about what it is i mean to say.

is it even possible for a human to think, without thinking in words? ideas are, as i construct them, really effing abstract; however, for the idea to be useful i need to understand it myself, and/or convey it meaningfully to someone else—requiring words, which are if not totally concrete, then at least far less abstract than the original idea. is it like converting from analog to digital, where no matter what, you lose something in the conversion? or maybe the recipient of the converted idea has a corresponding upscaler built in, so that they may fully reconstruct the original? do our brains contain codecs for meaning?

i understand this is all very aimless and lah-dee-dah and will sound horribly pretentious at your end, and that's not my intent. honestly i sat down tonight and was just going to post that urban dictionary link and have a little chuckle. i have no idea where all this came from. but now the idea is in words, and i have conveyed it, dig?

'language is the liquid / that we're all dissolved in / great for solving problems / after it creates the problem'
(modest mouse)


p.s. 'mathematics do [sic] not lie.' (you had me at mathematics.)

THE WORLD IS CRAZY and made just a bit smaller by this little knot that ties us all together; this profoundly satisfies me.

holy $adjective $deity: well implemented perl GETS ME WEEPY, BITCHES

i urge you to read at least a couple of these. true: i will never know whether you did, but i will sleep easier knowing i asked.


the mandelbrot set
when we finally isolate the higgs boson, we will smash it apart and julia will emerge and open her eyes.

kolmogorov complexity
and not just because it links to the mandelbrot set.

the lorenz attractor
credo, sine ratione, reality is fractal. there is no smallest grain.

quaternions
these little guys are all tangled up with my thoughts of the grand unification theory. it's out there, and it will extract a terrible price, you mark my words.

hyperbolic geometry
what a difference one little axiom makes: the universe (at one extreme) ends in fire, or (at the other) in ice, or (at the lack of extreme) neither.

the normal distribution
every, repeat every field of knowledge can be seen better when cast in the warm light of the bell curve.

euler's identity
cthulhu fhtagn euler—it is the source of his power.

the laplace transform
as the article says, these buggers will not only drastically reduce the time and effort required to solve the problem, but will fundamentally change the way you think about the problem.

turing machines
reductionism! reductionism! reductionism! HOW MANY TIMES MUST I TELL YOU

the unary magic square
and, of course, it works with arbitrarily lonely values of one.

separatiőn
i saved the best for last. this is basically the holy grail of the mathematical universe. (i'm a simple guy, and i don't say that with pretense.)



p.s. happy birthday, harry.

at this point my memory becomes slightly fuzzy

and suddenly it's like a quarter to five the following morning and i'm in my underwear with my old college texts out and i'm scribbling notes about exponential towers and *omorphisms whilst humming 'woman in love.' the internet is a gateway to the darkness waiting deep inside.

concurrently i find my greatest pain when later that night shiny things first work, then almost work, then utterly fail to work, and then so thoroughly bugger my windows installation that it requires a rollback to prior restoration point. if i could i'd go back in time and just tell myself not to take the thing out of disk mode for any reason whatsoever and save myself many bitter tears of frustration.

bottom line: there is beauty in its utter simplicity. on or off. louder or quieter. linearly or meanderingly.

i thought my wife's nano was small, but seriously. i've had dreams that weighed more than this, and still held less data.