Author: admin

There are many examples in science fiction of somebody winding back time to change things. And we have all had the experience of saying “I wish I could go back and do that differently.”

Suppose time travel did exist, and we were each of us on our own personal timeline in a branching multiverse. In that reality, you could always go back and change the past.

On the surface, it would seem that there is no paradox, because the reality you create that second time around would, from your perspective, become the only reality. These sorts of do-overs would be seen as a kind of “temporal insurance”.

Is such a reality even theoretically possible, or does it fall apart due to self-contradictions? I can definitely see some issues.

For example, in your universe, you could always win at the stock market. But if everybody wins at the stock market, then the very concept of a stock market stops making sense.

I suspect that such examples will lead to multiple contradictions. Living together with 8 billion fellow humans seems to be incompatible with a world in which each of us is uniquely fortunate.

Which definitely raises some red flags. But could we mathematically prove that such a world is impossible?

For me the last eleven months have been an extremely eventful. I am sure that at the end of this year I will look back on 2024 with a mixture of awe and exhaustion.

So it is odd to find myself, as of this morning, at the beginning of the final month of this already jam packed sequence of 365 days. I am sort of hoping that these next 31 days will be more restful and less eventful than the 334 days that have just gone by.

But you never know. 2024 might still surprise me.

Today is the birthday of Jonathan Swift (b. 1667), Mark Twain (b. 1835), Alan Sherman (b. 1924) and Woody Allen (b. 1935). What is it about November 30 that brings out the best in satire?

I know that Jean-Paul Sartre never actually said “To do is to be.” That attribution is found within a piece of graffiti described in Kurt Vonnegut’s 1982 novel Deadeye Dick.

That particular grafitto has a long and illustrious history. It went through many stages of evolution over time, and has a fascinating provenance.

But that’s not the topic of today’s post. Instead, I would like to focus on those actual five words “To do is to be.”

Personally, I find that life seems to have more meaning for me when I am engaged in what feels like a productive creative task. If I am making something, and I believe that it is new and worthwhile, then everything makes sense.

When I am not doing that, it feels as though I am mainly treading water. I can only enjoy things passively for so long. Then at some point I just have to create something.

I can’t say for sure that this is a healthy way to live. But it sure is productive.

I’ve always wondered about the nature of Thanksgiving. There is indeed something wonderful about a holiday that millions of people can share in, regardless of their religion or belief system.

Yet the rather dark and complicated history of Thanksgiving aside — how it began depends very much on who you ask — I can’t quite figure out the exact nature of the current holiday. I mean, that is, beyond the fact that people eat a big meal together on a Thursday.

Ostensibly Thanksgiving is a secular holiday, because ostensibly we are a secular nation. But if it is a secular holiday, then who exactly are we giving thanks to?

Happy erev Thanksgiving everyone!

Yesterday somebody told me that there are only three essential requirements for a cult: Money, Men and Manipulation.

My first thought was that this was a wonderful use of alliteration. In how many other ways, I wondered, could the same thought be expressed?

Let’s start with the letter A. The three essential requirements then become Assets, Assholes and Appropriation.

Moving up through the alphabet, the three requirements are Bounty, Bros and Banditry.

We then get to Cash, Cads and Corruption. Followed closely by Dinero, Dudes and Defrauding.

It’s a fun game to play. How many letters of the alphabet can you use to express the same idea?

Maybe something to try in your church group.

About 1% of whiskey or brandy evaporates in its wooden barrel over time. This lost amount is called the “angel’s share”, out of the folkloric idea that angels are taking their share of the spirit.

In American politics today we are seeing something vaguely similar, although of a different spirit entirely. The creep has been making one ghastly and offensive choice after another for his cabinet, mainly opting for slightly nutty incompetents to serve as obedient acolytes.

But being an experienced conman, he knows that a good con requires a good distraction. Especially if you are filling your cabinet with anti-vaxxers, election conspiracists, rapists, climate deniers, Kremlin apologists, COVID deniers, medical quacks and a puppy killer.

How do you distract people from a rogue’s gallery like that one? Rising to the occasion, the creep nominated an actual child molester for Attorney General.

Of course that one didn’t go through.

It was a brilliant move, in its way — letting one evaporate so all the others can remain. All things considered, you could say it was a sort of “demon’s share”.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think the creep is evil — that would be giving him too much credit. I doubt the man could add up a grocery list.

But he is very good at the single thing that he is good at — causing chaos and destruction, then lining his pockets and the pockets of his friends in the ensuing confusion.

I guess it’s always good to have a skill.

When you live in NY City, you become acutely aware that millions of people are living in parallel realities. We each have our friends, our co-workers, the people at the local deli, and a few other people that we interact with. Everyone else becomes a sort of blurred background.

Protocol on the street or in the subway dictates that we politely ignore all of those strangers around us. We do our best to stay out of their way, and if all goes well they do the same.

On a psychological level, it is as though multiple universes are co-existing in the same space, physically intertwined, yet emotionally disconnected. Every once in a while an encounter with a stranger pierces that veil, but for the most part it remains intact.

I wonder what it would be like if we all actually saw each other — I mean really saw each other. Or is such a thing simply outside the capability of a society of humans?

100 years ago today, the New York Times reported Edwin Hubble’s definitive demonstration that Andromeda is a separate galaxy. And in that moment, millions of people began to understand that the Universe was vastly larger than had been generally believed.

Hubble’s observations were made possible by the pioneering innovations of Henrietta Swan Leavitt. She was the first person to demonstrate a “standard candle” — an astronomical object with a known intrinsic brightness. That discovery finally let astronomers calculate how far extremely distant objects are from Earth.

I love the term “standard candle”. Once you wrap your head around its significance, there are so many other ways that this idea could be applied.

With the right standard candle, we can illuminate the Universe.