What’s Jaouen Jonesing For?

Comments have been fixed, so you can now comment without having to register an account. I had been having trouble with spam. I got 20k spam comments during my time off, so I decided to make people register to stop it. I have set up a bunch of filters that should help. Now, make some noise!

My pent up rage has subsided as the US economy’s drop into 3^rd world status has begun to slow. Its time to, Buy! Buy! Buy! Too long have I been walking places, like a chump. I really need to get my hands on something that will allow me to be just as extreme during the summer as I am during the winter. A mountain bike seems like the perfect solution. A computer has also been on my mind. I saw a Windows commercial recently where they sent a woman into the Apple store with a thousand dollars and she couldn’t get anything. Then they sent her to a store with Windows computers and she found exactly what she wanted. Well, I’m not anything like that dumb lady, my purchases represent the distilled essence of cool, so I want to drop a few G’s on an Apple! There are several different schools of thought with regard to these purchases. One school, we will call it the Danny and Ben school, says that if there are 2 expensive items to chose from, buy a cheap version of both. So lets say, for instance, I want to buy a computer and a bike. By the Danny and Ben schools of thought, rather than buy a sick Yeti at around $3600 bucks, or buy a MacBook Pro for about $3100 bucks, I should settle for both at a cheaper price point; say a $1600 Mac Book and a $1500 Specialized Stumpjumper. Both are quality products, but they don’t feel like someone injected them with a syringe full of awesome. The other school, is the Brant school. These school of thought names are scientific, so pay attention. The Brant school of thought is to buy one of the two objects at the high price point. Under this line of thinking, I would end up with a badass bike, say a Yeti 575 or a Specialized Enduro, but would walk away with no computer. Historically, this train of thought has lent itself well to my lifestyle. The problem is that it limits the number of toys in my arsenal, but it maximizes the value of the toys that I do have. The net worth of the toys is the same, but there are half as many. The upside to this train of thought is that every toy feels like it is a sports car, wreathed in flame, driving at 300 miles per hour, being chased by ninjas. Awesome. This is the train of thought that led to my television purchase, as well as all of my skis. All are totally badass, but ridiculously expensive. So, these are my choices. Live by the Danny and Ben school, or the Brant school. It’s a tough choice. One limits the number of areas into which I can spread the light of my awesomeness, but at the same time makes the awesomeness shine with the light of ten thousand suns. The other option allows my awesomeness to spread like the clap though a dorm, but limits the severity of the symptoms. All I can say is this, “Fuck That!”. I’m getting my cake and I’m eating it too, bitches! I’m getting the MacBook Pro and the Yeti 575 (Or Specialized Enduro, I haven’t quite decided that yet, but feel free to weigh in on the decision). To steal a line from Contact, why by 1 when you can by 2 for twice the price. The financial side of my decision to buy both is complicated, with lots of ins and outs. The moral of the story though is that I’m not going to stoop to the lameness of the Ben and Danny school, nor am I going to limit myself as the Brant school would. Instead, I am going to be as fiscally irresponsible as the Bank of America, and get both. Oh, and I’m going to get one of those Apple Notepad computers when they come out. Suck on that irresponsible awesomeness. Who needs to retire, just buy really dangerous toys and use them in an extremely dangerous and life threatening manner. Same thing.

We are currently having issues with readers being unable to see posts and strange formatting. The only browser with these problems is internet explorer. If you are using internet explorer, I suggest open firefox to view this page. I will try to fix the issue soon.

UPDATE:  It works fine with google chrome too.  And the google cache has a version that looks good too (missing todays post though).  If you are using IE still, get with the program.  Firefox and Chrome are where its at.  Oh and Safari works fine too.

When I was young, my father brought home an apple computer. This was back at the beginning of this whole “computer revolution”. It was a paperweight at best by today’s standards, but at the time it was the top of the line. It had a 256 KB hard drive. My father explained to me, 256 kilobytes is an astronomical amount of memory. We will never use all of that. It should be noted that 256 kilobytes is about 10 blog articles in Word format. My iPhone has about 10 thousand times more memory than that apple, and I can fill it in a heartbeat. Here lies the problem though. How could my father have possibly envisioned our world back then. How could he even fathom the concept of an iPhone in a time when we had tiny hard drives, 10 megahert computers, and cell phones the size of mini coopers. If he had, we would have skipped 18 years of learning and understanding. I learned very well from my father’s comments. I learned that we can never say never, and we can never say impossible.

As I grew older, I started getting told by teachers that nothing is impossible. I still believe that. That’s why I’m perplexed when I see people say that things are impossible or hear a someone tell me, “This is a fact.” In college, a professor of mine who was a major asshole (and won the Nobel prize for creating Bose-Einstein Condensate), told my physics 3 class that these strange quantum rules he was explaining were fact, and there was no argument about it. Well, that may or may not be true, but who knows what we will find when we look at the systems underlying the quantum world that we have observed. It is impossible to say with absolute certainty that anything is true. We have only had modern science for a few hundred years at best. I think it’s still probably a bit immature to believe that anything that we say is fact. Not long ago, we thought it was a fact that we moved through ether in the universe. Not long before that, the universe rotated around the Earth. Even before that, we thought that the world was flat.

What do you think cavemen thought when they saw lightning? They probably didn’t think, “Oh, that’s a stream of electrons moving from an area of high electrical potential to an area of low electrical potential over a route through the air who’s composition, pressure and temperature offer a path of least resistance.” Fuck that! Those guys where probably scared shitless by the seemingly random and completely unpredictable fire that the gods were attacking with from the sky. For them, fire from the gods was a perfectly reasonable explanation that matched their observations of lightning (Although, to steal a line from Dawkins and butcher it, when something is mysterious it doesn’t make sense to postulate that an even more mysterious super being is behind the mystery.) Just like now, quantum weirdness doesn’t make much sense to us, but we have postulated rules for the system that seem to match our observations.

The only reason that this came up is because I read an article this morning that said that warp drive is impossible. The word impossible was even used in the article. What a narrow minded interpretation. In 1994 a physicist theorized that warp drive would be possible by surrounding a spaceship in a bubble of space-time. The idea was that the ship itself couldn’t travel faster than light, but there is no reason that a bubble of space-time couldn’t move faster than light through our space-time. There were problems, such as the equations showing that the bubble would be filled with Hawking radiation. Regardless, it was interesting and it opened our eyes. The article I read this morning though, reports that the quantum theory predicts instability in the bubble as it passes the speed of light. Therefore, it’s impossible. Bullshit. Maybe that approach to the problem of faster than light travel is flawed, but that doesn’t in any way rule out other methods of solving the problem. Furthermore, what if that instability in space-time is like the instability in radioactive isotopes and leads to remarkable discovery. Maybe we will find a way to stabilize the region of space with some future understanding and manipulation of the underlying principles of the universe. The fact is that we just don’t know enough to be making comments like, “That’s impossible.” By the way, the scientist who wrote the original paper, Semiclassical Instability of Dynamic Warp Drives, doesn’t come to any conclusions about warp drive being possible or impossible, he simply states that the system becomes unstable (A true scientist.) The report that he wrote though, will only be read by scientists and reporters. The mainstream is reading articles written by narrow minded science reporters that jump to the conclusion that warp drive, or any faster than light travel, is impossible. It’s shameful, and completely unfounded.

I don’t think it’s a big stretch to imagine a future in which superstrings or quantum gravity or the Higgs field can be manipulated by man. The possibilities in that world will be endless and amazing. If we can make computers with electrons, what could we do with streams of quarks or by manipulating bosons? I don’t know, but I hope I’m alive to find out. If you leave this blog with one simple concept in your mind, your time here will not have been ill spent. If Joe can do the splits, nothing is impossible.

Now, go chase a dream.

Last weekend I went skiing and saw this guy hit the biggest cliff that I have ever witnessed.  His buddies posted the video on youtube.  You won’t be disappointed.  Click here to  see it!