Author: admin

Sheltering at home can have a funny effect on your head. The relative lack of contact with a physical outside world can be unnerving, to say the least.

One of the struggles we seem face these days (among many) is the simple ability to maintain a consistent sense of reality. I find that certain activities help me to focus and recenter.

One of these is the New York Times crossword puzzle. Since this has always been a mental challenge for me, not a challenge out in the physical world, it links me back to ways of thinking pre-pandemic.

I wonder whether one could systematically try to figure out which parts of one’s sense of reality before the pandemic were similarly independent of that outer physical world. Right now, embracing such activities might be very good for one’s mental state.

Today I drew a sketch for a house plan. I did it with pencil on paper, with no computer involved..

I realize that there is all sorts of fancy software out there I could have used. Yet there is something immensely satisfying about creating plans for things in the physical world using only tools that exist in the physical world.

It would be interesting to compare house plans created with pencil and paper against house plans created with computer software. Might there be systematic differences between them?

Even more interesting, would you be able to tell the difference just by walking into the house that eventually exists in the real world?

A lot of the important decisions we make are based on incomplete knowledge. Oftentimes, it’s not that we are making decisions carelessly, but rather that some aspects of a situation are simply unknowable.

Yet we don’t generally freeze like rabbits, unable to make a decision. Somehow we charge onward, continuing to decide on our next move while living with uncertainty.

I wonder whether there is a complex mechanism in the human brain that allows us to do this. Is there some sort of intuitive “probability machine” that we are always running, which assesses the current odds of success in any situation?

If so, I wonder how accurate it is, and what sorts of things can throw it off. We already know that there are obvious answers to that last question. Lack of sleep or too much alcohol can completely shut down our ability to choose the higher probability option for success.

But what about the opposite question? What can we do to increase the accuracy of our internal probability machine? Whatever it is, I’d like to try it!

Tomorrow is the deadline for a preliminary proposal we are submitting to the National Science Foundation. Eight of us faculty members, at three collaborating Universities, are asking for $15M over seven years to develop ways to make it easier for people to collaborate over long distances.

Sadly, this is the best time to ask for support for such a proposal. It is all too clear that Zoom and its equivalents are poor substitutes for physical presence.

We are under no illusion that anything we do will replace being there in person. But that’s ok.

After all, nobody thinks of the telephone as a replacement for being there in person. But it’s still nice that some really smart people invented the telephone.

My father, whom I loved dearly (and who loved me dearly as well), passed away some years back. Even now he shows up in my dreams.

In those dreams, he is not suffering from the terrible wasting disease that made the last years of his life so painful. Instead, he is in the prime of his health.

In these dreams my father and I generally find ourselves walking along, deeply immersed in one-on-one conversation. He is his usual calm and wise self, and I know I can discuss just about anything with him.

When I wake up, I usually don’t remember what we talked about, but I know he has given me great advice. On those lucky mornings, I feel ready to face the world and take on whatever might come my way.

I have a feeling that my dad will always be dropping by from time to time, whenever he knows that I need him. This makes me very happy.

Today, the longest of the year,
I’ve nothing much to say, I fear.
But I suppose it is all right,
‘Cause this will be the shortest night.

Today is Juneteenth. I encourage you to set aside some time today to research the history of this holiday.

If you actually take the time to learn what this holiday is all about, you might find yourself thinking very differently about a number of important topics that affect all of us. And that’s a good thing.

Today I read a fascinating article in the New York Times about the recent discovery, in South Korea, of an ancestor of the modern crocodile. It seems to be an entirely new species, heretofore undiscovered.

What’s fascinating is that it lived 100 million years ago, was nine feet long, and walked on its hind legs. Pretty cool stuff.

When I read this, it reminded me of something I had seen, and then I realized what. Walt Disney’s Fantasia anticipated something similar, as you can see in the image below.

Amazing foresight, yes?

Imagine trying to describe cars to pretty much anyone in 1870. You’d need to explain that hundreds of millions of people own these crazy futuristic contraptions. Each such contraption weighs about 3000 pounds, can go faster than 60 miles per hour, and can be controlled by anyone from a teenager to a senior citizen.

Also, to make this entire system work, much of our world will need to be radically transformed by an insanely expensive system of paved roads and highways. Just to make cars practical to use.

The person you are talking to would probably think you are crazy. And given what they know about reality, they’d probably be right to think so.

It is thoughts like this that allow me to believe in radical visions for our future. No matter how crazy an idea might seem in one era, it can end up being perfectly ordinary reality in a later era.

We don’t know what will be possible in the future. But we are always right to dream.

Luckily, Gorsuch brought the
long game, betting that
laws govern better than
luddites. Grateful because they
listened. Goodness before tribalism!