Theory on Time as a symptom, not the cause, coming together...

In a recent Facebook discussion, I referenced the development at http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-04-scientists-spacetime-dimension.html re: "...space-time has no time dimension..." and how it reinforces my gut-level feeling about the concept of time.  Thanks to a response by my former Lutris colleague Daryl, a few thoughts came together.

1. The folks behind this article didn't go far enough to put some visual teeth into it (for us lay people), and 
2. Once again, Julian Barbour and his work come to my rescue to explain what could be going on...

Barbour, his book called, "The End of Time" and his site http://platonia.com mean a lot to me.  In particular, he has proposed a view of existence he's dubbed Platonia. Platonia looks like a typical landscape rendering you might see in an landscape architect's office except that it represents the likelihood of events (i.e., probability).  The illusion that is created as physical space changes in sequence is the perception of time.

While looking at one of Barbour's very recent papers, I saw that he appears to be driving to a quantum theory of the universe. Or at least he's describing why the universe could be described in quantum terms. As I understand things, time prevents folks from getting to a quantum explanation... but only if you see time as a building block and not an outcome of the dynamics of things.  If you remove time from the space-time equation and replace it with the sequencing of change, then his Platonia view of things as movements powered by probability, makes a quantum thoery of space, and its coming into existence, more attainable.

So that's as far as I can run with the original article I referenced at the beginning of this post.  There's more to come now that I have a new reason for exploring Barbour's work again...

Life is so cool...

Kicking the Sugar Thing in 2011

I have been a sugar addict all my life.  Just love the taste of the stuff.  Peanut M&M's are my favorite indulgence.  I've always relied on them for reward during crazy hours behind the computer.

But, starting the day after new year's 2011, I made an impulsive switch to a low-GI (Glycemic Index) diet, a.k.a. Atkins.  I'd been on Atkins before, so I knew what it was about.  But because I've been teaching myself to cook the past year, it seems to be more doable this time.

Two months later, I'm writing to report on how things are going.  It's real simple.  My mind is more clear than it's been in decades.  I don't have incredible impulses to eat.  And I'm generally very happy about the whole thing.  Yesterday, I played some driveway basketball with my youngest daughter, Claire.  She just turned 11.  There was something different about this session.  I felt great.  I felt light, upbeat and, most wonderfully of all, full of energy.  Maybe there is something different about getting all your energy from protein and not carbs.

The toughest part of the diet has been the eggs thing in the morning.  Started to gag just thinking about them.  But I've found that, for me, sautéing some mushrooms and bell peppers, at a minimum, make eggs a wonderful thing.  Just break a few eggs on top of the aforementioned sauteed items and the result is a wonderful blend of goodness including whatever I sprinkled on top. Chives. Yes.  Garlic.  Yes.  Now I'm moving on to including spinach.  Starting to border on eggs florentine.  Without the bread, of course.

So here's what I like about by new life style after two months of this stuff.
1. Lack of appetite is wonderful.  I don't feel like something I can't see is controlling me.
2. I'm much more into water these days.  Naturally.  I have no problem with craving water.
3. Exercise seems much more natural.  Can't wait to get to the gym tonight.

The only thing I _really_ miss is sourdough bread from Santa Fe.  I'm originally from San Francisco and sourdough is in my blood.  And sourdough from the Santa Fe bakery is awesome.

I'm reading a book called "The 4 Hour Body" by Timothy Ferris.  It's informative, inspiring and hilarious.  Even mentions Chad Fowler, who was an early days champion of the Enhydra Java application server when he was at GE.  Now he's a long-time Ruby evangelist.  That was pretty cool.

I'll report on the impact that book has had on me in a later post.  And it even helps me with my sourdough jones.  

Groovy Tip and How-To (gathering specific files from a directory)

I'm working on a service in Grails that offers all kinds of methods for getting dates or formats of dates with single line calls. For example, dateTimeService.getBracketDates() which will return the first and last dates for the current month (e.g., 2/1/2011 and 2/28/2011). It's not rocket science but I have no desire to re-invent the wheel every time I'm creating a new monthly report for our marketing folks.

Tip: Keep a code snippets (experiment) file

One of the awesome things about groovy is that it's a lot like script programming. That makes it very convenient to try pieces of code and functionality you're not sure about before adding it to your project. Be forewarned. I'm a vi nut. I'm aware that dev tools have snippet support. I just find this works for me, and perhaps for you too.

The nice side-effect of this practice is that you build up a semi-structured collection of groovy and coding knowledge to reference in times of need and senior moments (not you, me!). Guess you could use it for old girl (or boy) friend names too. Another nice side-effect might be "instant book" once you insert a few paragraphs between each snippet!

Put a System.exit(0) at the end of your snippet so that your groovy interpreter doesn't try to execute all the accrued code below. This won't protect you against using variables that have already been defined lower in the file. All I usually do is attach a number to the end of the variable name to get rid of the name collision. Afterall, all I'm trying to do is validate my code. I used this little practice of mine to refinethe How-to below before subjecting you to what might have been buggy code.

How-to: Gathering list of (specifically-named) files from a directory

Here is one of many ways to accomplish this task. I found this old code snippet from my snippet file and thought I'd share it. By the way, a site I love to consult on little basics like this is Pleac Groovy. It's not the most groovy-tized site in the world, but I like it's get-it-done blue collar perspective.

So this bit of code returns a list of log files that use the the naming convention of <directory path>/<year><month><day>.log. In particular, this code winnows the list of files down to the files stored in the month of February (i.e., 201102.*\.log). The regular expression is pretty lame. I'm sure you could improve it.

def baseDir = '/tmp/logs'
def originalFiles = new File(baseDir).listFiles()
println "number of files found:"+originalFiles.size()

// here's our closure, a match expression
def screener2 = { it.name =~ /.*201102.*\.log$/}

def screenedList = originalFiles.findAll(screener2)
println "Number of files matching :"+screenedList.size()
println "screenedList :"+screenedList

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 :