Jul 072008
The Cincinnati suburbs are shrouded is awesomly thick foliage which hides almost everything but the metropolitan area. This is both aesthetically awesome and also great for hiding and snatching up passerbys.
The racial tension is intense. There’s a pretty clear division between the east side (white) and the west side (black). It probably stems from the racist, redneck mentality of the east which leads to an aggressive disposition in the west that keeps perpetuating itself as a circular, retarded, self-fulfilling prophecy. That being said, if you go on the west side at night you’ll probably be shot.
As you go into the city there’s billboard after billboard for vacationing elsewhere.
Ohioans are the most self-deprecating group of people I’ve ever met. Every time I tell someone I recently moved to the city they apologize. Even more confidence inspiring than the billboards.
My place’s deck sits across from the “Riddle Road Market and Deli,” which specializes in random foodstuffs (some chips must be years past their expiration date as I haven’t seen some of the designs on them since I was a child), soda (or “pop” if you suck), but most importantly it has a wide variety of boozes and cigarettes. This brings an eclectic mix of crackheads from the west and ridiculously attractive U of C girls from the east together. It’s better than TV.
My favorite place outside of Cincinnati is the P.F. Changs off of I-75. Not because of the food, but because the entrance is a revolving door in which clingy couples that try to both fit in the same slice get awkwardly stuck in it all the time. The longer the wait for our table the better.
The air is so humid it’s impossible to feel clean for a period longer than 4 hours. I’ve regressed back into my early college days when I’d only take a shower every few days. No use in fighting it.
The fireflies are ridiculously kickass.
Or maybe a dream. Doesn’t quite feel like living yet.
Colorado seems so far away in my head; a clusterfuck of good memories that I know are rose-tinted and don’t even belong together. There’s a weird, tiny part of me that illogically thinks everything is waiting back there. That some sort of strange trip would get me scotch with Doug, coffee with T, parks with Laura, bars with Alex and Andy, seeing my family in our old house, playing with our deceased dog Misty, drinking with the Durango kids (Lauren, Greg, Kail, Brian, Matt, Amber, Kristin, Fred, etc) and finishing the night off with some wine and a movie with Haley.
None of those I’ve ever really had during the same time. Half of them are geographically separated and most of them are separated by time. Most of the things in that list I’ll never have again.
I hate absolutes. “Forever” is the worst of them.
Not to say I’m not enjoying my stay here. Not knowing a single soul was tough, but over the past few days I’ve met a few really cool people and hopefully there’s more like them. Cinci is a weird city.
My goofiness is coming back too (not that you’d ever know if from shitastic posts like this), which I missed terribly.
Best of all, my obsessive, racing mind is starting to make itself present again. It comes in little spurts, but with a little time I have a good feeling it’ll be back. It’s the main reason why I left; that persistent uncomfortable feeling you get when you’re out of you are out of your element shoves my mind into a sort of abstract state. I’ve caught myself wondering what periodic traffic models sound like on FM, what new geometries you can discover by ignoring different Euclid postulates (starting with the Parallel Postulate), and how you can use recursive methods to model thought (instead of say, weight matrices ::cough:: neural networks).
Thank God that’s coming back. I was pretty sure that was lost in the haze of my freshman year at college.
So this is the start of a new passion; I want to either set my mind completely at ease and accept mathematics as the best method of abstraction for modeling our world, or I want to destroy it.
Jun 302008
For those who know, please keep my mother in your thoughts/prayers today.
<3 yall.
Jun 132008
I sometimes wonder,
With my thirst for new experiences
And your passion with finding new words,
If our pieces really didn’t align
Or if we were just trying to fit the wrong sides.
Jun 112008
3:30 AM and not looking like we’ll get done anytime soon.
Really looking forward to some R&R in North Carolina this weekend.
Today was the first time I realized my month-long trip turned out to be my permanent move. C’est la vie.
Too many places to see, too many people to meet, too many things to do to root myself in any way.
Cincinnati until September 1st then I’m off to the Maine to work my way down the east coast. Life is pretty damn exciting when you situate yourself in it correctly.
Jun 082008
Our planned day off didn’t come together very well. However, we only worked 15 hours today!
5:30 AM right now and still on the grind >.< If C# would fucking support SOCKS proxies I’d probably be in bed right now.
So I’m building an HTTP proxy bridge that will be run locally and cycle through proxy lists, that way C# (or any other language that doesn’t support SOCKS) can use the local HTTP proxy and still get the benefits of other proxies. If anyone is interested e-mail me and I’ll throw over the program and API specs probably.
Edit:
Went home at 6:30 AM. Certainly can’t complain about a morning like this though:
Jun 062008
Today I realized that I haven’t been homesick once since I’ve left. In prior trips there’s always been a point at which I really wish I could go back home.
Not to say I don’t miss my family and friends, I do. But the actual yearning for the location just isn’t present at all.
Home has become whatever small piece of land lies beneath my feet. I carry my perception of home with me and its transitory permanence is both comforting and exciting.
I’ve met a few people I really like around here and the less quickly I judge people the more I learn from them.
I haven’t been this happy since I left Durango. Each day gets just a little bit better.
I’m not quite sure how or when I exalted mathematics to a point beyond the scope of scrutiny, but when I mentioned yesterday to Doug that I was questioning the infallibility of math he responded with “Yeah… so?”
It’s strange to me that I never questioned mathematics at its fundamental level when I seem to question everything else. It is extremely easy to throw out criticisms of it when everywhere you look and everything we have is a byproduct of math and science. I viewed opposition of mathematics as iconoclastic in a way; merely a method to spark argument for argument’s sake (like critiquing the literal translation of parts in the Bible to get a rise out of people). I regret not listening more.
It started when I was reading “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” but it could have just as easily started in an introduction to philosophy class, wondering why we thought the Earth was flat (and why we now think it’s round), or any other sort of thought dealing with facts, or truth. The question is “What is the nature of truth?”
To put it kindly, my knowledge of philosophy is horrible. I found myself thinking about the question fairly extensively and I came up with truth is subjective and is only valid when it yields some sort of perceived results or convincing indirect results. The results that can’t be perceived that are regarded as fact are due to an extension of what Stanley Fish calls interpretive communities, or trusted groups of people that tell us results occur and are believed by us. This view puts truth within the individual and leaves room for religion and superstition to be treated as truths but also opens up a plethora of unsolvable discrepancies between facts. This quick-n-dirty theory is essentially just a poorly thought out Pragmatic Theory of Truth, but it seems to work in my mind so I’ll regard it as true, for now.
So on to math. Mathematics seemed like an easy place to start with truth since I believed it was the poster child of pure logical abstraction. However, the more I thought about math on a conceptual level the less satisfied I became with my prior disposition.
Math as a Language
Parallels Between Mathematics, Linguistics, and Rhetoric
It was George Orwell that introduced (to me, that is) the idea that our thoughts are constrained by our language. In his book, 1984, Orwell’s dystopia enforces a language called Newspeak which consists of only the most basic elements of language. This was done in order to make thoughts unapproved by the aristocracy “unthinkable.” His idea was limit the language, limit the thoughts.
If stripping a language of its superfluous vocabulary results in a more narrow scope of thought, it would seem that extending the vocabulary of a language would result in deeper and more meaningful thought. The problem I have with this is that all new words introduced into a language has to be defined by the basic elements of the existing language (excluding nouns of external objects which can be defined by interaction and sensation). A language is built from fundamental experiences that are universally shared and from these simple building blocks we construct more complicated symbols that are used to more accurately describe experience.
Using the basic building blocks of language we can begin to construct logical arguments. In rhetoric, an enthymene is a starting place for a chain of logic in which you leave off the first step because it’s self-evident or universally agreed upon. It creates an implicit premise which allows a starting point for the syllogism to be constructed upon.
Mathematics is built entirely from axioms and postulates. Axioms, in particular a subset called logical axioms, are statements that are taken to be universally true (self-evident) and therefore create a starting point in which a system is built. Extremely complex and useful systems arise from these simple axioms, but at the very base of any theorem is generally just a few fairly simple axioms; they’re the Newspeak of mathematics.
I’ve heard all my life mathematics described as “the universal language.” It wasn’t until very recently that I started to see just how much of a language math really is. Its basic building blocks are its core vocabulary, its rules are its linguistic syntactical structures, its theorems are its rhetoric’s syllogisms. English, French, Spanish, and math. Ambiguity comes with language; I think it would be hard to find someone who would argue that any language is perfect (by what measure would you define perfection in the first place?).
Math Abstractions
Abstracting the Real as a Way of Modeling our World
The real power of mathematics is how we can model fairly complex ideas through a more simple abstraction or model. Nothing is a perfect cube, but l^3 will give us a great idea of the volume of a cube-like object. We have done this for nearly everything in the macroscopic world. Modeling from simple stationary objects to fairly complex equations modeling speed, acceleration, waves, vector fields, population changes over fixed resources, and a myriad of other models we have abstracted from the “real” to put into our ideal frameworks.
I should say right now that I am in no way dismissing or critiquing the usefulness of these techniques and my argument against it wouldn’t even be considered weak. Inane, useless, and vacuous come to mind.
It doesn’t FEEL right. Something doesn’t sit well having to use an irrational number to define something as simplistic as a circle. Doesn’t it seem odd that a circle, a fundamental shape, is IMPOSSIBLE to precisely describe in the language we created to specifically deal with such calculations? Pi is the easiest example, but what’s probably used even more than pi is Euler’s number; seen everywhere from stuff as simple as compounding interests and population densities up to complex numbers and probability theory. Even the Golden Ratio is irrational! Though these are abstractions, which makes irrational numbers legitimate in mathematics, it feels as though these are warning signs that our original axioms in which these abstractions are derived from do not describe the natural world correctly.
A classic example of abstraction weirdness:
1/3 = .333…
2/3 = .666…
3/3 = .999…
?
The last statement is actually correct, since .999… is precisely equal to 1.
Abstracting Too Far
Leaving the Physical World
Anyone who has taken even rudimentary number theory knows that mathematics can stray far from the physical world and create its own little universe. Amazingly, within this universe of pure abstraction, we can sometimes “get back” to the physical world through either manipulation of unreal systems or through interpreting the systems differently (for this think of control theory or Nyquist). While these methods have proven to be very useful, they go outside of the realm of what is natural which nature, by definition, doesn’t (we’re still trying to model nature right?).
The main example that I think of when I talk about going outside nature while still staying within our artificial constructs is imaginary numbers and the complex plane. These simply do not exist in nature and are a pure abstracted result of the system in which we created (those pesky negative roots). They’re incredibly useful though, and manipulation can yield “natural” models and results. I believe there should be a way of circumventing this abstraction to stay within the realm of nature while still arriving at the same results. If nature does it naturally (duh o.O), then why can’t we create a system of describing it that stays within the confines of nature as well?
Problem from the Start
The Fallacy of Axioms
To tie this rant up, I think the problem we have in describing nature using our current system of mathematics lies in the a posteriori nature of the original axioms. Math, which has been described as a purely logical system, is based on postulates created by “self-evident truths,” or more simply, universal observations. With observation you bring bias, and I think there’s the possibility that we’re running into so many mathematical problems describing quantum mechanics partly due to fundamental axioms which were created based on observations of how we THOUGHT the world worked. The macroscopic implicit truths don’t translate well at the atomic level and perhaps we need to heavily modify or even abandon our language in which we describe these natural occurrences for a more concise one.
So…?
I know I don’t offer any sort of alternative here. Hell, I don’t even know what one would look like. I’m just questioning things I’ve never really asked myself and nearly everyone who I’ve talked to about this has intrigued and interested me more. I’m also aware that this isn’t set up as a logical argument at all and any attempt at organization was self-serving (my thoughts meander way too much).
I guess I can summarize everything fairly well with one question:
Is mathematics truly the best possible system for precisely describing the natural world?
Jun 012008
Twice today. So it goes.
Shooting some handguns helped.
I love everyone I’ve interacted with since I’ve left; I’m perpetually impressed with them.
So thank you to Drug Wall knife lady, guy who chased me down a couple city blocks because my water bottle fell out of my backpack, the “open trail policy” ranger, the Dubai chick, the sleepy gas station guy, the laundry mat laser lady, and I suppose (semi-begrudgingly) even Subway girl.
Thank you Liz for your fantastic phone-tour of Rapid City.
To Mira and her sister for meeting me randomly in Iowa for lunch. No doubt kicked some ridiculous ass on the MCATs.
Thank you Lauren for your understanding and always willing to talk when I’m down.
To Laura who is one of the most intelligent and hilarious girls I know. I can’t get enough of you (we’ve tried multiple times at supersaturation). I hope you enjoy your time in South America and I’ll be seeing you in New York.
Doug. What can I say? Even thousands of miles and months and months gone you’re still one of the biggest influences in my life. I’ve always been amazed with how you can talk intelligently about anything. Thanks for dealing with all my math shit recently. I miss you man.
Of course my Mom and Dad, who fund a good portion of my nonsense and who are always there when I need to talk. Thank you Dad for talking with me about math today; formulating a concrete question really has helped focus my argument.
Thank you Sam, family, and Morgan for letting me stay with you and being fantastic hosts. I’ve never felt so welcome.
Thank you to Q, Posp and friends for letting me hang out for the night with you guys. The shish kabobs were amazing and if I ever need to hula hoop in a life-or-death situation you guys basically saved my life.
Special thanks to Ryan and Asia. You both spoil me entirely and I can’t express how grateful I am for you both letting me stay with you. I’m learning so much here.
And lastly, to my new (or new project at least) business partners. Let’s makes some monies.
If work settles down this week expect a huge rambling blog about the fallibility of mathematics. I’ve been thinking about it way too much not to go on some stupid and meaningless tangent about it.