Echoes in a Hollow Space

Random quote of the day:

“We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people’s lives.

—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance



Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Lucy and Ethel, Justin Bieber, or the Kardashian Klan. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

It's that kind of day, folks.

Remember: Isolation is like Richard Nixon. (Brought to you by the Similie of the Day generator which ccfinlay kindly shared with his flist.)

And I got this from stillnotbored who should really have a happy birthday:



I'd say that sums up my hopes for the new year nicely. And as for this:




Give the gift that keeps on giving, I always say. I do seem to be obsessed with witch trials, though. And last, but certainly not least, here's something for my fellow romance lovers:

• Mom's feeling good. I am a very grateful girl. Everything else is of minor importance.

• We haven't lit a fire in the fireplace in the three years I've lived at the house, and I suspect it hasn't been lit for a few years (at least) before that. So I called the chimney sweep. He's coming a week from tomorrow. Busy season—that's the soonest we could get him. And yesterday, we bought ourselves a Xmas present of a new fireplace screen and matching loggy pokey things. A steal at Target. I would have done almost anything to avoid going to the actual Target store, but the roommate balked at the $30 shipping (apparently fireplace screens and loggy pokey things didn't qualify for the as-advertised free shipping). So, I spent Sunday at Target. Oh the humanity! =:0 But the hearth looks so pretty now! It made us both happy.

• I haven't written a damned thing since Mom got sick. I haven't been in the right frame of mind, and I got sick myself (minor stuff, finally feeling better). I may get started again when I'm on vacation, but we'll see. I always plan a lot for my Xmas vacations and then do a full body collapse.

• I will be on vacation (in town, at home) from December 24 through January 4. I so need it!

• The electrician is coming out to fix the track light that the painters broke last summer. We discovered yesterday that it was hanging from an exposed wire. Oops. We've been living with it in this state for many, many months, but knowing is different from ignorance and we're sure it's going to cause a fire. The electrician doesn't think it will be too expensive. Alas, the heating man did not have such "good" news. We're going to need a new furnace to replace the misfiring thirty-year-old in the attic. That's going to hurt, but we can probably scrape it together between the two of us and shifting accounts around. We do not have a mortgage, thank Ggod/dess, and are in no danger of foreclosure. In that, we are truly blessed.

• I've starting crafting things again—mostly small assemblages, jewelry, minor league textiles, things I used to do a lot but got out of the habit. I'm really loving it. I found I needed to do something with my hands as well as writing. It makes me feel more balanced.

• Friday I'm having two crowns done on my upper left jaw. I broke a tooth a few weeks back, and I've needed a crown on that back molar for some time. I may have let that one go too long. He won't know until he gets in there whether I'll have to have a root canal.

• For some reason, when I feed Min in the afternoons when I'm home on the weekend, I am now required to pet her and say, "Yummy food, yum yum," before she will commence eating. If I do not engage in this ritual, she looks up at me as if to say, "Get on with it. I'm hungry." As soon as I engage in the ritual, she eats. She doesn't pull this in the morning when I feed her, nor does she pull this with the roommate when she's fed afternoons on the weekdays (she has a whole separate ritual with her, but I won't go into that). Min's a precocious little darling. You do something once and it becomes a ritual. And she's extremely odd. I don't know who has spoiled this cat so badly. Cat spoiling ninjas, most likely.

• And I got a new Oster food processor for Xmas! It's so pretty in stainless steel. Now I'll have to knead some dough or grind some meat or something.

I've been reading George Hansen's Trickster and the Paranormal since late last year and I'm closing in on the end. It's dense, scholarly, meticulously footnoted, but chock full of interesting things. In the passage I just finished reading Hansen was talking about a phenomena observed in parapsychology labs in the 70s: retroactive psychokinesis. Psychokinesis (PK for short), if you don't know, is the ability to move objects or make physical effects occur just by concentrating one's mind upon them.

Helmut Schmidt, a well-known researcher, used electronic random number generators (RNG for short) to generate (randomly!) clicking noises which were fed into headphones of subjects being tested for PK ability. Their task was to see if they could speed up the rate at which the clicking noises occured. A statistically significant number of the subjects were able to do this. So Schmidt tried another variant on this experiment: he had the RNG generate another run of clicking noises only this time he taped them on magnetic tape. As a double blind and control, he re-recorded them onto paper tape. Then he hooked more subjects up to the headphones and gave them the same task, to increase the rate of clicks, not telling them that the clicks were pre-recorded. The test runs of pre-recorded clicks had significantly more clicks than the controls, as if the PK had reached back in time to change what once had been.

But in science it's not a valid finding unless other researchers are able to replicate the experiment with the same or similar results, right?

And that's just what happened. Different researchers in different parts of the world, using other methods of randomly generated clicks and more stringent controls, replicated this research at least four different times. I might add that all these experiments were fairly rigorously controlled.

I'm not sure I buy that the PK is traveling back in time, but I haven't got a satisfactory explanation for what's happening here—not in the usual cause and effect sense. This experiment, and others like it, lapse into some loopy land of quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the well-known experimenter effect (wherein the expectations of the experimenter can effect even rigorously controlled experiments), and Lawd knows what else.


"Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine."

—Sir Arthur Eddington, English astronomer (1882 - 1944)


Damn straight, Artie.

Now, if I could only find a way to use PK to clean my house...

Tagged by the lovely and talented sonyamsipes.


THE RULES:

* Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
* People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
* At the end of your blog, you need to choose (8) people to get tagged and list their names.
* Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.


MY LIST:

1. I graduated from UCLA, but usually support USC in sports except when they're playing UCLA.
2. I have lived in California all my life.
3. I have been to England three times and want to go again.
4. Some of my ancestors helped found Germantown, PA (now part of Pittsburgh).
5. I love sobe noodles—love them, love them, love them—but think they are a pain to cook.
6. One of my relatives married into the Dalton gang.
7. I really can't stand basketball.
8. I worked for one summer (between high school and college) at the La Brea Tar Pits cataloguing fossils and in the Microfossil Lab.


MY TAGS:

I think most everyone I know has been tagged, but if you want to play and haven't been, consider yourself tagged!

blah blah blah blah blah.


But, there is this--which some of you may have heard of already:

http://www.bookcrossing.com/


I've been giving books away for years. I'll still probably give the majority of them away to libraries and etc. as I have been, but something appeals to me about maybe tracking the karmic journeys some of them might make. I also am a fan of:

http://www.wheresgeorge.com

There's something about randomnicity, chance, and watching it work that hooks me every time.

☛ You know when that little disk icon pulses at the bottom of the document when you're saving the file? When I see it, I think, "heaving bosom."

☛ Really, in good conscience I can no longer defend Laurell K. Hamilton. It's not because everyone is unloading on her, or because she's asstard du jour—that's never prevented me from defending her before. And it's not because I've suddenly turned into a prude after reading gazillions of her books. It's because she's subverted the damned story to sex and isn't even trying to work out plots anymore.

ETA: Inspired by a discussion over at athenais's place (among other places).

☛ Can your magic genie desert you overnight? One day he's flying you through the clouds like he always has, the next he never calls.

☛ My cat was upset this morning when I changed my the sloth routine of the last week and a half of vacation. "Wait! You're leaving? I thought I'd broken you of that bad habit."




Min: Get off the computer now! It's laptime.


Random quote of the day:

"To move forward you must first look behind."

—Jeffrey Ford, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque

✒I got good news about my bad ankle from the foot doctor yesterday: the exercise program is working. I won't have to have surgery or take gut-shredding medication. Huzzah.

✒My favoritest show in the whole wide world started its new season last night: Ghost Hunters. Dig those wacky plumbers! Which means I still didn't watch my tape of Wire in the Blood.

✒I've spent the day designing the most ridiculous airship ever. It's been loads of fun, but I'm not sure it would ever get off the ground--or stay in the air. Cartoony, but fun. Frank Reade meets Loony Tunes. If form follows function, this probably doesn't function at all. Must make prettier, sleeker.

✒I spent another $50 at Amazon, justifying it with the "I need it to write my novel" excuse. Okay, maybe I needed one of those books. The others were just because. I will never be out of debt.

✒Being a writer is one of the wackiest things on earth. It means you have to get intimately acquainted with all sorts of strange subject matter: airships/hot air balloons, flintlocks, air currents, string theory, boundary branes, men's underwear...

✒Here's a funny link: Indiana Jones loses tenure.

ETA: Oops. Did that last one already. That's how random my brain is these days.


Random quote of the day:

"All these fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no nearer to the answer to the question 'What are light quanta?' Nowadays every rascal thinks he knows, but he is mistaken."

—Albert Einstein, letter to Michel Besso, 1951

Quote of the day:

"Take my advice, if you meet anything that's going to be human and isn't yet, or used to be human once and isn't now, or ought to be human and isn't, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet."

—C. S. Lewis,
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe


What's new in the yard:

The amaryllis are making a bold statement: three huge red-orange bells, and maybe half a dozen more buds in the planter waiting to pop. The purple cosmos are in profusion, and the pink and white geraniums are having a rave. The green callas are also having a convocation against the side front wall. We planted marigolds last week--brilliant orange and yellow accents in the yard. The Scotch broom isn't doing so well. We moved it and it's hanging on, but tired. The tea tree, otoh, is quite happy.

Interesting item of the day: I was watching a program called Is it Real? on the National Geographic Channel over the weekend. This program likes to take on things occult/paranormal/fortean and debunk them, and it's quite an interesting program, even if I think that sometimes the arguments of the skeptics seem a bit strained and shrieky and most "believers" are portrayed as credulous boobs; even if they often choose examples of phenomena which are most easy to debunk and ignore the cases that pose serious challenges. I think quite a lot of stuff in the "paranormal field" is hooey, too, but I like to see them honestly debunked rather than a burning of straw dogs. The research done by the Global Consciousness Project at Princeton wasn't so easy for them to dismiss.

This weekend the show took on prognostication. I'm not much of a fan of fortune-telling. I like to play with oracles, but mainly for the psychological side of it: oracles help me focus on issues and figure out what I truly feel about them. Sometimes oracles are also a way of releasing my own intuition about something (or perhaps reinforcing my prejudices). It helps tremendously in my decision-making process, but I really can't say I subscribe much to the foretelling aspect of oracles.

The NGeo program dealt a great deal with Nostradamus—somebody I personally think is quite easy to debunk. But they also cited this recent research at Princeton on randomness and collective consciousness that they weren't quite able to debunk, imo. Michael Shermer (ed., The Skeptical Inquirer) threw some half-hearted arguments at the subject, but they weren't at all convincing to me, and seemed to lack his usual verve and energy.

Essentially, the Princeton folks distributed random number generators in computers all over the world and had them constantly doing the computer equivalent of flipping a coin. As statistical chance would tend to suggest, most of the time the RNGs came up with a equal number of heads vs. tails. However, in the hours leading up to some of the more extraordinary events in our new century, these numbers starting skewing sharply in one direction or another. The most dramatic spike took place starting about four hours before the first plane went into the Towers on 9/11. A dramatic spike also occurred before the big tsunami.

It's as if, in the hours before super traumatic events, the collective unconscious begins to hone in on these events and somehow effects the functioning of random chance. Michael Shermer said something to the effect that every day of the week has something somewhere in the world that we'd call a big event, but I think that's a pretty flimsy argument. Events like 9/11 and the big tsunami and Katrina are not every day big events—they are stop-you-dead-in-your-tracks events, collective gasp events. We know they send shock waves in their aftermath, and it also seems logical to me that they would send shock waves behind them. Since time-space is folded and not linear, as we tend to think of it, it seems logical to me that some receptors can pick up on those back-pedaling shock waves.

But what do I know? I'll let the parties involved make their own arguments:

Here's the research paper from the Princeton folks:

http://noosphere.princeton.edu/terror.html

A somewhat more user friendly version:

http://www.boundaryinstitute.org/randomness.htm

And the skeptical POV:

http://www.skepticnews.com/2005/04/index.html

I came across some very interesting sites this week which kicked up a lot of dust in my psyche. I thought I'd share:

http://postsecret.blogspot.com/

You may have heard of this one if you listened to NPR this week. This is a site where people anonymously send in their secrets to be posted.

It made me hanker after doing conceptual art again...

The Post Secret web site is all about communal art, about making an art installation without any physical space, and I just loved it. It's cool to think of random strangers sending in bits and pieces of themselves for a collaboration; because they needed to share and felt safe to do it here; because they just couldn't resist. I wanted to do something similar using virtual space instead of physical, but I haven't thought of anything yet that isn't derivative. Got a little notion of something this morning (based on a random event in my vicinity), but it's not fully formed yet.

I used to do visual art along with the writing, but I reached a point of diminishing energy and had to choose between the two. I knew that the time had come where I had to focus seriously on the writing if I was going to take it to the next level and for me, because of that limited time and energy, that meant laying aside other things. It really wasn't too difficult: writing gives me the fire in the belly, visuals and conceptual art are things I like, that are fun, but don't instill the same kind of passion. So I set aside my plans for art installations and thing-making (I was a sculpture and textile arts girl rather than a drawing/painting girl). For the most part, I haven't looked back. I pull out a project now and then when I just want to relax and work on something, but I'm not filled with longing for lost art projects.

As I said, this secrets project has me thinking about doing art installations that don't take up physical space (always a problem for someone living in a one-bedroom apartment). I used to make plans for installations, even started a couple—artworks where viewers could actually walk into and participate in—but I'm a non-affiliated artist. I didn't go to art school, don't know the right people, have no gallery or museum hook-ups. So the chances of getting anyone to let me have space to set up one of these is next to nil.
If I'd really had the passion for it, as I do with writing, that wouldn't have stopped me. Which tells me more than anything that it wasn't my passion, wasn't meant to be, wasn't where I needed to focus.

http://www.foundmagazine.com/

Related, in a way, but different. This magazine is also something of a communal art project. People send in notes they find on the streets, or pictures of the notes they've found if they don't want to give them up. These are alternately moving and hilarious, sometimes creepy as hell, sometimes cute—and utterly absorbing. At least for someone of my proclivities.

I wanted to go out immediately and start searching the streets...

One of the things I used to love to do was found object sculpture. I'd incorporate random things found on the streets, garage sales, thrift stores—wherever—and make them into interesting object collages. I L-O-V-E the work of randomness in art, love to take disparate things and make them into something new, or take something old and give it a new perspective. This is a very powerful pull for me and this site really kicks that excitement up. I'm a big fan of Betty Saar, who did a lot of this in her work—often intimate and delicate and female. A lot of artists have done this and I recently saw an exhibit at the Norton Simon of just this kind of thing—but can I remember any of the other artists??? A mind is a terrible thing to waste...

Lost but Found: Assemblage, Collage and Sculpture, 1920-2002 It just ended, so they don't have the exhibit info still up. There were big guys like Picasso and Duchamp as well as others less well known. Some really good stuff.

You know, I guess it's not really all that different from your crazy Uncle Ned who likes to make lawn decorations out of hub caps, et al. Just a different perspective on the same idea, really. But whether it's Uncle Ned or Betty Saar or Marcel Duchamp, there's a power to this stuff, something that declares, "Look here! Everything has its own beauty (even the ugly stuff). Everything is just a matter of how you look at things."

In honor of this, I pulled out a broken dish mosaic that's been in the back of the closet for ever so long. I really don't have the time for it right now, but I'm thinking maybe I need to at least fiddle with it a bit. Even if it's just to look at it and say, "Huh," and put it away again. Creativity feeds creativity. Everything we do to nourish our souls inevitably gets returned to us in our art. Especially when we're in the saggy middle sections of our novels and feeling frustrated and restless...

Our blackest stuff, our brightest stuff, our random occurrences, all go into the making of who we are and have to be accepted as part of the toll we pay for a rich life. Sometimes it makes one seem foolish, that enthusiasm of the true geek, but being a Fool isn't such a bad thing. I think if we were more willing to be foolish now and again, to live out our geekage unapologetically, we'd have fuller and more complete lives. It's that trying to be cool all the time crap that really impoverishes us.

But there's foolish and there's foolish:

http://www.livejournal.com/community/customers_suck/9865898.html?thread=10778282

I sure hope you can open the sound file on this. When you read it in transcript it sounds like a hoax, but when you hear the tape it seems all-too-horrifyingly-real. It has nothing to do with the other two sites—except maybe in an absurdist, randomist kind of way.