Thinking Room

When it comes to thinking, I do the most when I'm in the bathroom. But tonight I was in bed trying to sleep and I got some pretty crazy thoughts.

In descending order order of occurrence:

1) Fine! I'll sign up for twitter.

2) "Up where they walk, up where they run, up where they play all day in the suuuuuun!" Fuck, I need to watch the Little Mermaid.

3) When we talk about the speed of light and that nothing can go faster than it, we fail to consider what the speed of light really is. We often think about it as about 300 million meters per second. We say "about" because we think that we don't know what the exact number really is because light moves to fast. But consider this:
We know that light cannot escape the Schwartzchild radius of a black hole. At this point, gravity is greater than all things, one of which being the momentum of light. Light must necessarily have a mass and therefore momentum (or analogous properties) if it is to be affected by gravitational force. To put plainly, light is slowed down to the point that it cannot escape a sufficiently dense mass.
We also know that light is bent by the gravitational force of all massive objects, notably stars. When an object's trajectory is changed it undergoes an acceleration. Acceleration is a vector. For example, when you jump up and down, your velocity is altered by the constant acceleration downward. For every moment in time, you can calculate your new instantaneous velocity by combining your last velocity and your acceleration. There is a point where your speed decreases so much that you stop. Like light at the Schwartzchild radius, you cannot escape the gravity of the Earth.

Now, we can conceptualize what happens when an object like a person slows down. A car travelling at 50km/h decelerates (or negatively accelerates) to 20km/h. We can imagine a car that was travelling fast, is travelling slower, and even a car that is stationary due to an acceleration causing it to have a velocity of zero.

Here is my main point: What the fuck does slow light look like? We imagine things like light turning into longer waves, like radio waves, when they are subject to a black hole. If gravity changes only the frequency of light, then how does it also alter its velocity in the case of gravitational lensing (where light bends around massive objects)?


Shit like that just blows my mind, man. I'm sure someone has it all figured out, but it still keeps me up at night.

Shoulda Woulda Coulda

I'm tired of people ragging on Canada and the Olympic organizers for everything that goes wrong. "Their opening ceremony hydraulics didn't work and that one arm didn't go up!" Guess what? It's fucking Canada. It's cold. Things break. It worked a hundred times before when they were testing it, but on that night it didn't work. Grow up and move on.

"They should have moved the pillars!"
"They should have put in a wall!"
"They shouldn't make the luge track so fast!"
"They shouldn't even have pillars!"
"They should just make a track that you can't get hurt on!"

Shut the fuck up. Seriously. An athlete died. You don't know him. You never even knew his fucking name before he died. Hell you, wouldn't know his name if he hadn't died. He could have won the Gold Medal and you wouldn't remember his name two weeks after the event. It's hard, but that's the fucking truth.

I'm not saying it isn't sad; it is sad. I'm saying that all these people are picking their battles and they're picking the wrong ones. People die in accidents all the time. People die in war even more. And still even more people die from preventable diseases when they have no access to treatment. So who is the bad guy? The Vancouver Olympic construction and engineering team for their malicious use of pillars, or you for not giving a shit about thousands of lives you could save if you bought your purse at Sears instead of Loius Vuitton and donated the difference to a worthy cause.

Self-righteous? You betcha. But I'm not the one pointing the finger of blame when it comes to an accident.

Yes, it's sad that he died. If it had been some kid who thought he was the shit and died sledding down a hill and hit a lightpost, we would laugh and say that he got what was coming to him. The difference is that we told him to do it. We dared him. We egged him on. Maybe we're the ones responsible for his death and that's such a bitter pill to swallow that we keep looking for someone to blame.

Thought Experiment

Okay, readers, I'm drunk as balls.

Why? Well, I have to pick my long lost buddy up in six and a hlaf hours, so I though the liquor would calm me down enough to sleep. Jagermeister just gets me excited. Jag and 80's music.

There was a point to writing this blog. Something about people at work...
Right! I miss the deaf guy! There was a deaf guy who used to come into the grocery store and I really miss him. I miss the non-verbal communication. I miss being able to talk to someone without having to talk. Fuck, man, he was awesome. But everyday at work it seems like I say words that no one hears. "Your total is $195.85. Debit? Stripe side out." And then they still put the fucking stripe in.

Fuckin' Deaf Guy and and I used to be way cooler. You know, we'd just see each other and nod like we knew what the shit was going down. None of the service industry bullshit. We both knew the score. He was buying food, I was selling it. Why put on a show? He and I could nod acknowledgment, point out pricing, and motion to one another what we needed.



We were always glad to see one another. It's like we were company. We got to know each other on a semi professional level. Not just a sales clerk to a patron and not quite a friend to a friend, but... kinda like people who waited at the same bus stop.


Shit, man, I don't know. I'm drunk as fuck and I don't know what I'm writing about.
I like those knowing smiles. I like knowing about someone. I like that idea of a special bond. Maybe I'm losing that, maybe I'm finding that, maybe it's just over the horizon.

Let me say for now that I will try to clarify tomorrow when I sober up. For now it is time to sleep. Fuckin' finally.

Capacity

I wonder if people have a certain capacity for life, or if life only has a certain capacity for people.

It seems like life moves on and people come and go. When someone comes in, someone is pushed out. When someone is pushed out, we bring in someone new. So I wonder if that is the way the world works, like the way the world is brought to an equilibrium on all things, or if we just don't make the effort.

You all know me. I let the world do what the world is going to do. I try to live on the surface rather than change the way things happen (even though I have, as the very name of my blog suggests, numerous problems with the world). So I wonder if the fluctuation of people within lives is due to my action/inaction, or whether it is due wholly to the ways of the world.

Here's an example: I broke up with my girlfriend a long while back (yeah, she dumped me, whatever) and I chose not to talk to her. I chose inaction. We since have spoken very few words to one another. I have better relationships with some people who I don't know the names of. On the other hand, I know a couple who broke up and tried to stay friends. As far as I can tell this resulted in some hurtful exchanges and now they are, again, as far as I know, not speaking. It seems that the course can be altered, but not the destination.

This makes me wonder if we have any control over the people who come and go out of our lives. Do we have any more control over that than we do over the flow of time?

Maybe not, but I should give some old friends a call.