probability, observer and speculating "existence"

Boy, am I going to get in trouble for a title like this entry's... but this is the kind of stuff that flows through my thoughts when I've been working too much and sleep deprivation denies my brain the energy to cling to my usual collection of standard worries...  and why not end 2010 with a bang!

I'm fascinated by the following aspects of life, according to a number of sources...

• All substance is composed of mostly nothingness. The ratio of particle to the space it occupies is staggeringly unbalanced.
• Quantum physics explains the smallest particles as waves of probability.
• For these things to exist, there must be an observer.

So my thoughts on this have come this far. If you play a game of traveling as an observer of your own life and you speed by the faces of people you've met or walked past, your children as they grew up, the silly arguments you've add, the places you've been to... all blurring as you pass them, what is it that you're really experiencing besides a collection of memories? And how could it be different if you have the ability to re-wind and start over again?

It seems that these are all probabilities that you observed and, in the process of observing, also participated in. It's no wonder why life seems more and more like a dream to me.

But, if you keep digging and thinking about all of this as probability, then life starts to feel less like something tangible and more like a continuous experiment of unconscious messing with probabilities. Combinations of probabilities. Combinations of observations. It's not really like there are a bunch of universes ("multiverses") out there (or in here). It's more like there are all these (floating equations representing) probabilities and you as the observer are making them real. Making them "feel" tangible. So rather than thinking of all of this as an infinite set of what's out there. It's more like everything is being generated as we observe.

All of this brings up the "soul" thing or "consciousness" as one of those fundamental "what is it" questions. Why? Because it's this observer thing that quantum physics says must exist for things to exist. It somehow implies that a soul has special ranking, almost as though it's outside the definition or occurrence of probability. An analogy might be the patterns you see of iron filings when under the influence of a small magnet. The patterns are the assemblages of probabilities. And the magnet is You, the consciousness. (That imagery feels pretty powerful... but it feels more like an influence or steering of probabilities and not just a passive observer roll. Is the observer by definition an actuator?)

I have no authority on this topic. I'm not a mathematician. But I do love how the many topics of physics opens (and throughly energizes) my mind. And as the explanations of things these days gets wilder and wilder, I don't think there's anything wrong with letting a bit of intuition and subconscious rumination have its day. The math helps to illuminate a conundrum. But as our math and its conundrums continue to stack up over time, our ability to go back to our imaginations for speculative interpretation becomes all the more critical to create a sense of things we can conceptually grasp.

As fantastical as the concept of "god" seems, it's actually nothing compared to what this life (you, me, existence) is really all about. My intuition is screaming that.

World Series Giants and me...

This is one of those little kid inside me takes over posts.

I was lucky enough and old enough to see the Beatles from their (U.S.) beginnings, but I consider myself even more fortunate to have seen Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Orlando Cepeda, Jimmy Davenport, Juan Marichal and Jack Sanford all through the 60's. Those Candlestick memories have dominated my thoughts the past few weeks and re-introduced my Dad in my day-to-day thoughts as well. I'm a pretty private person and don't intend to blog much about that, but I will say that I absolutely love my past as a young kid. I was pretty damn lucky.

The even better part of the whole Giants-Rangers-Phillies-Braves experience was hanging out with my New York daughter Amanda over the phone. She kicked things off by calling me from a downtown pub in Philadelphia the evening the Giants won that last game... wearing her Giants hat! Brave young woman and a TRUE Giants fan. Will Clark, Kevin Mitchell and Rod Beck were the guys during Amanda's early days. It was wonderful to feel so connected between PA, NY and ABQ! Thanks Amanda!

This is from the San Francisco Chronicle website @ http://www.sfgate.com :

The little things in vi that make folks watch and go "wow"

My guess is that I'll add more hints & tips to this posting, so be sure to bookmark it and revisit every now and then.

-- David 10Oct2010

I don't know if all of your colleagues will go "wow", but I know you'll be a lot more productive than you would with a standard Eclipse editor or MS Word.

Task: You want to enter command mode to try all of the commands in the rest of this page:

# press Esc key
<ESC>

Task: You want to find whole words spelled "the", excluding words like "them".

<ESC>
/\<the\>

Task: You have a text file of numbers representing some of your customer account ID numbers. You're creating an SQL query statement and you want to corral those numbers into an IN clause like "... where clientId in (333, 444, 555...). But the 10 numbers are listed, one by one, on ten lines. How do you get them collected into your IN claus?

First thing, you want to append commas after each number, with the exception of the 10th number.

# replace the endline of each line with a comma.
# to avoid putting a comma after the 10th number, specify the line range as 1 through 9.
:1,9s/$/,/g

Now it's time to bring everything onto a single line. Do this using "J" for join.

# Join the 10 lines onto a single line
<ESC>
:10J

You should see all 10 numbers on the same line now. Fill out the rest of your SQL query.

Task: You have a bunch of concatenated strings that each should occupy a single line. Each string is separated by the damn ^M characters that do nothing to create a visual line break.

<ESC>
:1,$s/<cntr-v>M/\\r/g

Task: You want to insert "</span>" between "Task" and ":", like I did when I decided to wrap a span tag around each Task word in this blog posting.

<ESC>
:1,$s/Task:/Task<\/span>:/g

Task: You want to jump to the 13th line in your text file.

<ESC>
:13

Task: Come back on occassion to see additional vi editor tasks here.

# At your browser's URL:
http://discretepassions.blogspot.com/2010/10/little-things-in-vi-that-may-folks.html

The miracle called "Khan Academy" -- Web-Ed the maximized way

It took me 5 minutes to realize I was witnessing a miracle. What grabbed me about Sal and his www.khanacademy.org?

• A charismatic, humorous voice.
• 1,800 12 to 15 minutes lectures - physics, math, business, chemistry, statistics and more.
• Explained at a pace and in a style that makes comprehension possible.
• Makes you feel like you can learn things you were never able to nail down back in college.
• And I sensed immediately that my 10 year old would relate to him, thanks to his trusting humor and kind voice.

So where does Khan Academy fit in? The answer: where doesn't it fit in?

• My daughter loves Migaland, a 2nd Life for kids. The agreement we have is that she must watch one Khan Academy math class before logging in to Migaland.
• This is the perfect supplemental homework pill for school teachers to give to their kids. Kids get distracted in class, kids have poor listening habits. Khan gives them a resource at home that 1) the kid can trust, 2) the teacher can trust and 3) the parents can trust.

So, why does this work? Why am I so convinced that this IS the greatest gift of the Internet?

• It's teaching using common sense... a person who has the gift is able to share that gift in a way that only the Internet can make possible.
• 15 minute lessons. How perfect is that? Life is fast. Afternoons are short. Evenings are just about impossible. But 15 minutes is a reasonable commitment with the option of doing another 15 minutes.
• 15 minutes is the perfect amount of time to except hyper focus. Yes, we do, can and should go longer than 15 minutes when we need to. But 15 minutes is also a way of limiting us from gorging, so that we can develop the long term memory of the lesson in a high quality, quickening manner.
• It's a huge opportunity for folks to diversify their knowledge. Go to the Khan Bank of Knowledge and check out "credit default swaps" or "La Place transforms." It's almost analogous to take a little pill and you have instant knowledge.
• It's been awhile since college for me. I've had a great career as a software developer and business executive. Khan is a gold mine of possibilities for me for "the next phase" of my life. It's all there.

Enough cheerleading for now. I don't know if Khan's courses will prevent Alzheimer's, but it sure will make life feel more unlimited than it already does. And for parents, it's a true answer to the on-going challenging of keep that kid learning...

Here comes Graphene... sharpen your pencils!

Reading about research and development around carbon-based, two dimensional, nano-worldly Graphene has been a lot of fun. If you're just ramping up as well, I thought I'd jot down some of my collected notes to help others on their way to good knowledge of Graphene.

First of all, Graphene is a one atom thick, 2-D slice of graphite, the "pure" stuff in your 2H pencil. It looks like a cross-section of a honey-comb with carbon atoms in a chicken wire-like pattern. Scribble on a piece of paper, take some scotch tape and left up your carbon-based jottings. Then desolve the tape with a solvent, like Benzene, and you're left with a few (or more) layers called Graphene.

Now, some tidbits or "reasons to care"...

1. Graphene is the strongest material known.
2. It's the thinnest membrane known, in the lab, to separate two bodies of liquids.
3. Pop a hole in a sheet of Graphene a few carbon atoms wide, you have a "nanopore". Drag a strand of DNA through it, you can figure out its sequencing (all that G, T, C A stuff). FAST.
4. Thanks to its incredible conductivity, it may eventually replace silicon as chip fodder. It's 100x more conductive than silica and isn't it nice it's not environmentally toxic as those other silica alternatives, like gallium arsenide?
5. As part of the quest to utilize Graphene as laid on substrates of silica, researchers are working heavily on getting the signal-to-noise ratio ramped up to maximize all that good conductivity.
6. Nanotubes are rolled up single layer sheets of Graphene.
7. Because of its high conductivity, Graphene makes great sensor devices, able to detect substances and get the word out quickly.
8. Graphene may represent a new class of capacitors, thanks to its conductivity and extremely large ratio of surface area to mass.

Lost the article I grabbed some of these details from. I'll post the link as soon as I find it. The bit about nanopores came from http://www.physorg.com/news203345672.html

Hope you found this helpful and now see Graphene as slightly less mystifying.