Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. -Philip K. Dick
Friday, July 31, 2009
Quote of the Day
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Boundary Waters and Renegade Paddling
In order to enter the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW), one is required to purchase a permit. The permit is issued at a BWCAW ranger station and is good for one group of up to 4 watercraft and 9 people. Requiring permits makes sense, because there are only a certain number of campsites, and limiting groups ensures one will be available (or at least makes it more likely). This also prevents overcrowding in general, and ensures the pristine wilderness is preserved and the impact of human interaction is kept to a minimum.
Overnight paddling permits are valid for the date of entry, and you may paddle for as long as you want. You may frolic among the lakes for months on-end, spending each night at a different campsite, so long as YOU ENTERED ON THE DATE OF THE PERMIT. No exceptions.
So, if, months ago, you scheduled your Boy Scout troop's permits for Sunday August 2nd, for example, and arrived only to discover one of your canoes needed to be repaired, and you cannot fix it before midnight, your trip MUST BE CANCELED and the whole troop must return home. Your permit is NOT valid for entry the next day. Once the minute hand crosses midnight on the date of entry, and you are not in the water, you are done. Go home. Your trip is over.
This was troubling news for me when I realized we will not be able to enter the water this Sunday. Since we acquired the permit months ago, usual scheduling circumstances have arisen that force us to push in Monday morning rather than Sunday afternoon. Therefore, we either need to cancel our trip or break the law and launch the day AFTER our permit. Saganaga from landing 55 will be under an iron blockade for overnight paddlers on Monday, August 3rd.
Fortunately, there was a permit available Tuesday, but, this means one day of being an outlaw on the water. Yes, from the moment our canoe slips over the placid waters of the north until midnight Monday, we will be criminals. Careful planning is required.
We will be heavily outnumbered and outgunned, so confrontation is not an acceptable tactic. We must slip through their blockade like ghosts, evading their security apparatus. We will blend into the crowd of regular paddlers christened with legal, Monday permits. Ours will be for Tuesday, at least our overnight. Our Monday permit will be for a day trip only, and require us to return to the landing the same day. By they time they discover anything is amiss, we will be miles away and dug-in to our secure bunker.
To ensure they do not find us, we will excavate a 10-foot deep circular pit, falling as many of the tallest Norway Pines as we can to construct an outer shell resistant to any small arms fire. We expect our holdout will be one of the islands on Saganaga lake, where we must repel all advances until midnight, when our Tuesday permit becomes effective. After, we must eliminate all evidence, burning the pines, and detonating enough explosives to ensure the entire island is completely submerged, and never seen again.
As a diversion, we will float one hundred fifty-five gallon drums of light crude into adjacent Seagull lake timed to charges approximately the time of our departure. The resulting oil spill will occupy the authorities the while we hide under our log and pine needle cover. There may be pandemonium and we don't want people caught in the crossfire. Therefore, we have reserved all remaining available permits for every entry point across the entire BWCAW to limit casualties. Almost every date before or after Monday was available, so we could seriously limit the possiblility of any unnecessary casualties.
If we make it, we expect to enjoy our reward. We have used our formidable resources to book every permit at every entry point throughout the BWCAW for the next 10 years. We expect to be the ONLY paddlers in the entire 1.09 million acre area for whichever 2 or 3 day trips we intend to take during that period. A secluded undisclosed location somewhere within this desolate expanse is where we will plan our next assault. The blood of renegade paddlers runs in our blood. It is our purpose, our mission. When we go down, it will be over the broken, scarlet paddle clutched within our fists as we slowly sink to the bottom of our watery grave.
Overnight paddling permits are valid for the date of entry, and you may paddle for as long as you want. You may frolic among the lakes for months on-end, spending each night at a different campsite, so long as YOU ENTERED ON THE DATE OF THE PERMIT. No exceptions.
So, if, months ago, you scheduled your Boy Scout troop's permits for Sunday August 2nd, for example, and arrived only to discover one of your canoes needed to be repaired, and you cannot fix it before midnight, your trip MUST BE CANCELED and the whole troop must return home. Your permit is NOT valid for entry the next day. Once the minute hand crosses midnight on the date of entry, and you are not in the water, you are done. Go home. Your trip is over.
This was troubling news for me when I realized we will not be able to enter the water this Sunday. Since we acquired the permit months ago, usual scheduling circumstances have arisen that force us to push in Monday morning rather than Sunday afternoon. Therefore, we either need to cancel our trip or break the law and launch the day AFTER our permit. Saganaga from landing 55 will be under an iron blockade for overnight paddlers on Monday, August 3rd.
Fortunately, there was a permit available Tuesday, but, this means one day of being an outlaw on the water. Yes, from the moment our canoe slips over the placid waters of the north until midnight Monday, we will be criminals. Careful planning is required.
We will be heavily outnumbered and outgunned, so confrontation is not an acceptable tactic. We must slip through their blockade like ghosts, evading their security apparatus. We will blend into the crowd of regular paddlers christened with legal, Monday permits. Ours will be for Tuesday, at least our overnight. Our Monday permit will be for a day trip only, and require us to return to the landing the same day. By they time they discover anything is amiss, we will be miles away and dug-in to our secure bunker.
To ensure they do not find us, we will excavate a 10-foot deep circular pit, falling as many of the tallest Norway Pines as we can to construct an outer shell resistant to any small arms fire. We expect our holdout will be one of the islands on Saganaga lake, where we must repel all advances until midnight, when our Tuesday permit becomes effective. After, we must eliminate all evidence, burning the pines, and detonating enough explosives to ensure the entire island is completely submerged, and never seen again.
As a diversion, we will float one hundred fifty-five gallon drums of light crude into adjacent Seagull lake timed to charges approximately the time of our departure. The resulting oil spill will occupy the authorities the while we hide under our log and pine needle cover. There may be pandemonium and we don't want people caught in the crossfire. Therefore, we have reserved all remaining available permits for every entry point across the entire BWCAW to limit casualties. Almost every date before or after Monday was available, so we could seriously limit the possiblility of any unnecessary casualties.
If we make it, we expect to enjoy our reward. We have used our formidable resources to book every permit at every entry point throughout the BWCAW for the next 10 years. We expect to be the ONLY paddlers in the entire 1.09 million acre area for whichever 2 or 3 day trips we intend to take during that period. A secluded undisclosed location somewhere within this desolate expanse is where we will plan our next assault. The blood of renegade paddlers runs in our blood. It is our purpose, our mission. When we go down, it will be over the broken, scarlet paddle clutched within our fists as we slowly sink to the bottom of our watery grave.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Time Travel
I just finished Ronald Mallett's book Time Traveler, which explains how, theoretically, we will one day be able to transport matter into the past...go back in time. When I say I just finished, I actually mean will finish July 20th 2019. But, I is actually my 41-year-old self which is someone entirely different from my young and stupid 31-year-old self. We both now exist in this causal plane, although he/me doesn't know I'm here. Anyway, I figured now would be a good time to zip back 10 years and write a quick post about the future before I continue my tour through history...
I became interested in time travel when I realized that it happens all the time. Scientists call time travel into the future "time dilation," and it happens whenever things move really fast. Sergei Avdeyev, for example, after zipping around the earth 11,968 times on the Mir space station is 1/50th of a second younger than he would have been had he stayed on earth. This is because things slow down as we approach the speed of light, even a tiny fraction of the speed of light. This has practical consequences, like clocks on satellites run more slowly, requiring its operators to compensate for the difference. If GPS satellites didn't take this relativistic effect into account we would all be careening off cliffs and driving into farmers markets and such.
Anyway, it's moving into the past that is difficult, which makes sense, as this is the thing that most of us really want to do. Mallett discovered that, since light can 'drag' spacetime, you can circulate a laser beam to create a vortex which can allow a pathway through time. Now, this pathway was only big enough to allow a neutron through. But, once he turned it on, he immediately started receiving all these neutrons from the future. He took a closer look and discovered messages encoded in the direction of their spin. He was receiving advice from himself and others in Morse code (or some other code) from the future! Well, this made his task far easier. His future guides explained exactly how to construct a working time machine that would allow humans to travel backwards or forwards through time at will. Within a few years they were being mass-produced, and every library and museum had its own public time machine. They became as common as telephone booths (when they were still around).
Now, at first I thought this would cause mucho mayhem too. I've seen Back the the Future, and I know what messing with the space time continuum can do to your guitar-playing skills. Fortunately, those writers tweaked the physics to intensify the dramatic storyline. The plot is not probable. Actually, the moment Marty went back, he would have become part of a completely new universe whose entire future would be irrevocably rewritten because of his arrival. It's kind of like how I came from the future and created this universe where I wrote this post and forever changed this causal plane of existence forever.
The future/present as I otherwise would have known it will never exist again, and the past as I had known it is gone forever. While there is some unimaginably small chance the course of events may turn out to be recognizable if I lay low (i.e. Marty's parents fall in love, get married, and have Marty), probability immediately fucks with everything indelibly changing whatever you remember from history books or heard from your parents. Chance is still chance, and just because the coin flipped heads before doesn't mean it will again. To move ahead to Back to the Future part II, remember Biff got his hands on the sports almanac and then bet on horses until he basically owned Hill Valley? Seems plausible, but that almanac would be completely unreliable seconds after you arrived in the past. The odds of the same horse winning are only slightly better than before, and only because you have access to additional records. But, there is no guarantee the horse that wins in the almanac will even make it out of the gate in your new universe.
Since I have chosen to return to 2009, the past 10 years (2009 through 2019) are gone...a personal fiction which never existed. I am simply 10 years older living in a reality only vaguely similar to the one in which I lived. Even though I have lived these years already, I have virtually the same chance of screwing them up.
Our future is always in our hands, and opportunity is slipping away each moment. Of the infinite number of possible futures, I am perpetually letting all but one slip through my fingers anyway. I find this daunting, even paralyzing. Nonetheless, it is a fact, and one which allows me to take my adventure in time travel lightly. For example, there is the universe in which I post this message on my blog, and, there is the universe in which I save it as a draft and forget about it. Traveling backwards in time was just another one of those irrevocable decisions that may haunt me the rest of my life or lead to enduring bliss. Who knows? The universe in which I had the opportunity to time travel but didn't would be difficult to tolerate.
While I am not actually future Mark, the plausibility of time travel does beg the question: "Are visitors from the future returning to our time to play? Rewrite history as they see fit?" Sounds disturbing, doesn't it? No wonder they don't show themselves. I think most of us enjoy some semblance of order, regularity and free will. And, if we are being subtly influenced by friends from the future, we are largely at their mercy. After all, we might ask why they haven't fixed everything already. We might blame them for all of our problems...the worlds problems from the dawn of civilization. No, they certainly couldn't show their faces, no matter how much suffering they have prevented or how many lives they have saved. I like to think of them as courageous and compassionate individuals, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank them for whatever past/present they have provided for us. In return, I might see what future I can help provide for them (or rather, their incarnation in this universe), and try not do a whole lot of damage in the process.
I became interested in time travel when I realized that it happens all the time. Scientists call time travel into the future "time dilation," and it happens whenever things move really fast. Sergei Avdeyev, for example, after zipping around the earth 11,968 times on the Mir space station is 1/50th of a second younger than he would have been had he stayed on earth. This is because things slow down as we approach the speed of light, even a tiny fraction of the speed of light. This has practical consequences, like clocks on satellites run more slowly, requiring its operators to compensate for the difference. If GPS satellites didn't take this relativistic effect into account we would all be careening off cliffs and driving into farmers markets and such.
Anyway, it's moving into the past that is difficult, which makes sense, as this is the thing that most of us really want to do. Mallett discovered that, since light can 'drag' spacetime, you can circulate a laser beam to create a vortex which can allow a pathway through time. Now, this pathway was only big enough to allow a neutron through. But, once he turned it on, he immediately started receiving all these neutrons from the future. He took a closer look and discovered messages encoded in the direction of their spin. He was receiving advice from himself and others in Morse code (or some other code) from the future! Well, this made his task far easier. His future guides explained exactly how to construct a working time machine that would allow humans to travel backwards or forwards through time at will. Within a few years they were being mass-produced, and every library and museum had its own public time machine. They became as common as telephone booths (when they were still around).
Now, at first I thought this would cause mucho mayhem too. I've seen Back the the Future, and I know what messing with the space time continuum can do to your guitar-playing skills. Fortunately, those writers tweaked the physics to intensify the dramatic storyline. The plot is not probable. Actually, the moment Marty went back, he would have become part of a completely new universe whose entire future would be irrevocably rewritten because of his arrival. It's kind of like how I came from the future and created this universe where I wrote this post and forever changed this causal plane of existence forever.
The future/present as I otherwise would have known it will never exist again, and the past as I had known it is gone forever. While there is some unimaginably small chance the course of events may turn out to be recognizable if I lay low (i.e. Marty's parents fall in love, get married, and have Marty), probability immediately fucks with everything indelibly changing whatever you remember from history books or heard from your parents. Chance is still chance, and just because the coin flipped heads before doesn't mean it will again. To move ahead to Back to the Future part II, remember Biff got his hands on the sports almanac and then bet on horses until he basically owned Hill Valley? Seems plausible, but that almanac would be completely unreliable seconds after you arrived in the past. The odds of the same horse winning are only slightly better than before, and only because you have access to additional records. But, there is no guarantee the horse that wins in the almanac will even make it out of the gate in your new universe.
Since I have chosen to return to 2009, the past 10 years (2009 through 2019) are gone...a personal fiction which never existed. I am simply 10 years older living in a reality only vaguely similar to the one in which I lived. Even though I have lived these years already, I have virtually the same chance of screwing them up.
Our future is always in our hands, and opportunity is slipping away each moment. Of the infinite number of possible futures, I am perpetually letting all but one slip through my fingers anyway. I find this daunting, even paralyzing. Nonetheless, it is a fact, and one which allows me to take my adventure in time travel lightly. For example, there is the universe in which I post this message on my blog, and, there is the universe in which I save it as a draft and forget about it. Traveling backwards in time was just another one of those irrevocable decisions that may haunt me the rest of my life or lead to enduring bliss. Who knows? The universe in which I had the opportunity to time travel but didn't would be difficult to tolerate.
While I am not actually future Mark, the plausibility of time travel does beg the question: "Are visitors from the future returning to our time to play? Rewrite history as they see fit?" Sounds disturbing, doesn't it? No wonder they don't show themselves. I think most of us enjoy some semblance of order, regularity and free will. And, if we are being subtly influenced by friends from the future, we are largely at their mercy. After all, we might ask why they haven't fixed everything already. We might blame them for all of our problems...the worlds problems from the dawn of civilization. No, they certainly couldn't show their faces, no matter how much suffering they have prevented or how many lives they have saved. I like to think of them as courageous and compassionate individuals, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank them for whatever past/present they have provided for us. In return, I might see what future I can help provide for them (or rather, their incarnation in this universe), and try not do a whole lot of damage in the process.
Friday, July 17, 2009
My vacation down south
I haven't posted in a while.
Been in hell waiting for you.
You never showed!
Should have, it was nice. I roasted marshmallows, floated down rivers of liquid hot magma, and even tried my hand at chaining myself to large stones and dragging them uphill. I got some silly looks, the same looks I got when I asked for extra fortune cookies in a small Chinese village. Apparently they don't do much of that anymore. Nonetheless, I was strangely comfortable there, basking in the pleasant toasty air. I rather enjoyed the flames, which circled around me. They tickled a bit.
The natives were friendly. There was no screaming or burning of flesh. I didn't see any agony at all in the whole place. The servants wore nice clothes and had a nice suite prepared for me, such fine cuisine, and I really wasn't sure sure whether to be delighted or insulted. They carried me everywhere on a chair they held on their shoulders. Hell was really a perfect fit for me. It so happens demons are excellent hosts, and they happily accommodated my every wish throughout my stay. Apparently all visitors get VIP service, but I got extra special top secret VIP service.
Aromatherapy, massages, turn down service. They even manually buttered my butter dish and de-crumbed my place setting before dessert. I had a team of attendants. After my Roman bath I was told I was welcome to stay. I asked for how long, and they said eternity. Imagine that! I was asked to sign on the dotted line. I thought about it...
Then, I thought about all the work that wasn't getting done back up top. I thought about you, the hard ground beneath my feet, the regular food, the perpetual inconveniences. I signed my first name, but paused. There were other things...things left unfinished. I stopped signing and took a rain check. My companions bristled, but allowed me to leave: "whatever you say, chief," they said.
I have an open invite to return any time. Let's take a tour sometime.
Been in hell waiting for you.
You never showed!
Should have, it was nice. I roasted marshmallows, floated down rivers of liquid hot magma, and even tried my hand at chaining myself to large stones and dragging them uphill. I got some silly looks, the same looks I got when I asked for extra fortune cookies in a small Chinese village. Apparently they don't do much of that anymore. Nonetheless, I was strangely comfortable there, basking in the pleasant toasty air. I rather enjoyed the flames, which circled around me. They tickled a bit.
The natives were friendly. There was no screaming or burning of flesh. I didn't see any agony at all in the whole place. The servants wore nice clothes and had a nice suite prepared for me, such fine cuisine, and I really wasn't sure sure whether to be delighted or insulted. They carried me everywhere on a chair they held on their shoulders. Hell was really a perfect fit for me. It so happens demons are excellent hosts, and they happily accommodated my every wish throughout my stay. Apparently all visitors get VIP service, but I got extra special top secret VIP service.
Aromatherapy, massages, turn down service. They even manually buttered my butter dish and de-crumbed my place setting before dessert. I had a team of attendants. After my Roman bath I was told I was welcome to stay. I asked for how long, and they said eternity. Imagine that! I was asked to sign on the dotted line. I thought about it...
Then, I thought about all the work that wasn't getting done back up top. I thought about you, the hard ground beneath my feet, the regular food, the perpetual inconveniences. I signed my first name, but paused. There were other things...things left unfinished. I stopped signing and took a rain check. My companions bristled, but allowed me to leave: "whatever you say, chief," they said.
I have an open invite to return any time. Let's take a tour sometime.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Independence Day
Every discussion about religion should end with "I'll see you in hell." I think it's also a good way to start...
So, when we get there, do you think we'll be able to complain about the heat and argue over the nature and temperament of our new pointy-tailed overlord? "The big guy seems to have a particularly voracious appetite for soul today; makes ours seem like an appetizer." Will we have time to discuss hell politics or ponder the nature of the afterlife? Oooh, wait. It would be the afterlife. No more lively speculation about that one. We would be fairly certain that things really could not get much worse. I mean, there isn't a "sub-hell" or anything, is there? If we were situated in a tolerable ring, imagine the possibilities! Eternal damnation is no longer a threat. Our pious hearts would no longer tremble with perpetual fear as they do here on earth. We could perhaps relax and enjoy a gentle roasting assured that our thoughts and actions would not deliver us to that screaching, blistering eternity of indescribable suffering. Think of the sinning we could do!
We could start at the top of the list and work our way down. Let's see, first we would make a toast to Satan, and agree that he is far superior to God. Then, toast to ourselves. Then, we could think of a whole bunch of silly names for God, and call him those. Oooh, what fun. Of course, this would all have to occur on a Sunday, and involve lots of work. Sinning ain't easy. Next, we could dishonor our parents somehow, which shouldn't be too dificult. Murder? Hm. Well, since there are no rules any longer, it would be okay to skip that one, but adultery would be a shoe-in. Woe to the unmarried without the opportunity to indulge in that particularly agreeable sin. Let's see. Next we have stealing, easy. We'll rip-off some of Satan's property. Bear false witness? "Hey, Satan, that guy stole your briar! I think he's after your trident." Covet? Not really sure what that one means exactly, but we would need to find a neighbor somewhere and do it to his wife, his male and female slaves, his ox, his donkey, and everything that belongs to him. Just finding a neighbor with all these things will probably be enough work to satisfy sin number 4. Then, we will need to rest for 6 days, and do it all over again next Sunday. Whew.
See? Hell ain't so bad. It's all how you approach it. In wilderness survival they call that PMA for "Positive Mental Attitude." I imagine a resolute cheerfulness would make hell quite tolerable, and even enjoyable...much better than all this terror of impending doom we have here on earth; what a downer. I imagine hell is really a place where we can gain a bit of independence from such things and live as happy, healthy demons. In fact, I'm quite looking forward to my stay, and look forward to seeing you there.
So, when we get there, do you think we'll be able to complain about the heat and argue over the nature and temperament of our new pointy-tailed overlord? "The big guy seems to have a particularly voracious appetite for soul today; makes ours seem like an appetizer." Will we have time to discuss hell politics or ponder the nature of the afterlife? Oooh, wait. It would be the afterlife. No more lively speculation about that one. We would be fairly certain that things really could not get much worse. I mean, there isn't a "sub-hell" or anything, is there? If we were situated in a tolerable ring, imagine the possibilities! Eternal damnation is no longer a threat. Our pious hearts would no longer tremble with perpetual fear as they do here on earth. We could perhaps relax and enjoy a gentle roasting assured that our thoughts and actions would not deliver us to that screaching, blistering eternity of indescribable suffering. Think of the sinning we could do!
We could start at the top of the list and work our way down. Let's see, first we would make a toast to Satan, and agree that he is far superior to God. Then, toast to ourselves. Then, we could think of a whole bunch of silly names for God, and call him those. Oooh, what fun. Of course, this would all have to occur on a Sunday, and involve lots of work. Sinning ain't easy. Next, we could dishonor our parents somehow, which shouldn't be too dificult. Murder? Hm. Well, since there are no rules any longer, it would be okay to skip that one, but adultery would be a shoe-in. Woe to the unmarried without the opportunity to indulge in that particularly agreeable sin. Let's see. Next we have stealing, easy. We'll rip-off some of Satan's property. Bear false witness? "Hey, Satan, that guy stole your briar! I think he's after your trident." Covet? Not really sure what that one means exactly, but we would need to find a neighbor somewhere and do it to his wife, his male and female slaves, his ox, his donkey, and everything that belongs to him. Just finding a neighbor with all these things will probably be enough work to satisfy sin number 4. Then, we will need to rest for 6 days, and do it all over again next Sunday. Whew.
See? Hell ain't so bad. It's all how you approach it. In wilderness survival they call that PMA for "Positive Mental Attitude." I imagine a resolute cheerfulness would make hell quite tolerable, and even enjoyable...much better than all this terror of impending doom we have here on earth; what a downer. I imagine hell is really a place where we can gain a bit of independence from such things and live as happy, healthy demons. In fact, I'm quite looking forward to my stay, and look forward to seeing you there.
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