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Jul. 21st, 2002 04:36 pmYou know, with the amount of work that actually happens here on weekends, I wonder why they really bother having us come in at all. I mean, I'm not adverse to them throwing money at me, but I do have glimmers of nostalgia about what having two whole days of weekend were like. And in some mythical age before that I remember when all the world was a weekend, and I was merely a very exuberant player.
Tangent (points awarded to anyone who knows the chain of reasoning between the last paragraph and this one) I need to figure out Burning Man stuff post-haste, seeing as it's just a month around the corner, and as of yet, I don't have a ticket or any sort of definite plan of attack for getting up there. I think I have the money for it, considering I should be getting some massive overtime paychecks betwixt now and then, and I can borrow most of the gear I'd need from my mom, but there's still food and ticket costs. And, more importantly, general mind set issues to work out.
I'm already seeing all of the good old Burning Man is the devil rants going up around the web. I actually agree with quite a few of them. The LLC certainly has a shady reputation that I highly doubt is entirely undeserved, and I find quite a few of their policies repugnant, but then again, I'm firmly of the opinion that even if you took a collection of the 20 most enlightened people in the universe and from those individuals made some sort of social order, it would be capable of coming up with some truly abyssmal policy decisions. Entities composed of groups of people are always less than the sum of their parts. I don't particularly like Burning Man the company, but I do like the place, and (some of) the people it draws. In the same way, I'm not too fond of the American government or the species of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, but we're better than nothing. Welcome to my philosophy of phlegmatic psuedo-nihilism. Which is vastly more interesting than nihilistic pseudo-phlegmatism. (Ve are nihilists Lebowski. Ve believe in nuffink!)
Finished Valis. It got much better at the end, winning multiple points on my personal rating system by 1) Being self-referential 2) Mentioning the Golden Mean 3) Containing the quote "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away". Which of course means that I needed new books. And with April's help, new books were obtained. Huzzah! I picked up the last Christopher Moore book that I haven't read, Coyote Blue and, of more immediate interest to me (because I'm a dork). Chaos and Fractals, New Frontiers of Science. It's big. It's heavy. It's got lots of numbers in it. And pictures. It makes me moist and gooey in really unwholesome ways. And has already fulfilled my bookish criteria of mentioning the golden mean. And in the first 20 pages, I'm already learning all sorts of new and exciting things about Sierpinski Gaskets. This is my favorite (Which, ummmm, probably none of you will care about. And if you do, you probably already knew)
If you take a triangle and arbitrarily assign numbers to the points, then draw a dot inside the triangle and proceed to iterate by randomly picking one of the triangles points, and then drawing a point exactly half-way between your point and the point of the triangle and using that as the base for your next iteration, and proceed ad-infinitum, you're left with the Sierpinski Gasket.
You can start with a dot outside the triangle also of course, but there's really no point, as the random process will eventually end up inside the triangle, which is where all of the fun starts.
From mindless stochastic process, glistening order. I love the universe. And at this point, the aspect of the universe I'm currently enamoured with is that I don't need to sit at this computer anymore. So, I'm wandering off... to go sit at another computer... Hrm. It's thoughts like that that make me think getting off away to Burning Man would be a really good thing.
Tangent (points awarded to anyone who knows the chain of reasoning between the last paragraph and this one) I need to figure out Burning Man stuff post-haste, seeing as it's just a month around the corner, and as of yet, I don't have a ticket or any sort of definite plan of attack for getting up there. I think I have the money for it, considering I should be getting some massive overtime paychecks betwixt now and then, and I can borrow most of the gear I'd need from my mom, but there's still food and ticket costs. And, more importantly, general mind set issues to work out.
I'm already seeing all of the good old Burning Man is the devil rants going up around the web. I actually agree with quite a few of them. The LLC certainly has a shady reputation that I highly doubt is entirely undeserved, and I find quite a few of their policies repugnant, but then again, I'm firmly of the opinion that even if you took a collection of the 20 most enlightened people in the universe and from those individuals made some sort of social order, it would be capable of coming up with some truly abyssmal policy decisions. Entities composed of groups of people are always less than the sum of their parts. I don't particularly like Burning Man the company, but I do like the place, and (some of) the people it draws. In the same way, I'm not too fond of the American government or the species of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, but we're better than nothing. Welcome to my philosophy of phlegmatic psuedo-nihilism. Which is vastly more interesting than nihilistic pseudo-phlegmatism. (Ve are nihilists Lebowski. Ve believe in nuffink!)
Finished Valis. It got much better at the end, winning multiple points on my personal rating system by 1) Being self-referential 2) Mentioning the Golden Mean 3) Containing the quote "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away". Which of course means that I needed new books. And with April's help, new books were obtained. Huzzah! I picked up the last Christopher Moore book that I haven't read, Coyote Blue and, of more immediate interest to me (because I'm a dork). Chaos and Fractals, New Frontiers of Science. It's big. It's heavy. It's got lots of numbers in it. And pictures. It makes me moist and gooey in really unwholesome ways. And has already fulfilled my bookish criteria of mentioning the golden mean. And in the first 20 pages, I'm already learning all sorts of new and exciting things about Sierpinski Gaskets. This is my favorite (Which, ummmm, probably none of you will care about. And if you do, you probably already knew)
If you take a triangle and arbitrarily assign numbers to the points, then draw a dot inside the triangle and proceed to iterate by randomly picking one of the triangles points, and then drawing a point exactly half-way between your point and the point of the triangle and using that as the base for your next iteration, and proceed ad-infinitum, you're left with the Sierpinski Gasket.
You can start with a dot outside the triangle also of course, but there's really no point, as the random process will eventually end up inside the triangle, which is where all of the fun starts.
From mindless stochastic process, glistening order. I love the universe. And at this point, the aspect of the universe I'm currently enamoured with is that I don't need to sit at this computer anymore. So, I'm wandering off... to go sit at another computer... Hrm. It's thoughts like that that make me think getting off away to Burning Man would be a really good thing.
