:: Insert Title Here ::

:: 2001-08-11 ::

I'm starting college in a month. Less than a month.

Surreal.

As it turns out, I'll be in the Sophomore dorm; apparently the Freshman one filled up before I got my moderately late application in. [Homer Simpson voice] mmmmm....Ethernet (drools)

Talked to my roommate on the phone. Cool guy.

- - -

You know, I used to think anthropology was mostly crap, that a lot of their "science" was stilted biased observation and that what they attributed to culture was in fact merely genetics at play. However. For some reason (perhaps a very smart anthropology proffessor who frequents a discussion forum I visit) that's changed - when I look closely, I now see culture instead of genetics.

Of course, genes play a role - more than likely, they focus initial tendencies, make basic emotional signals to certain events. Environment (especially the wider culture) interacts with genetics in complex dance, however - and that is something that our culture often overlooks.

- - -

I'm planning to do some tape-recorded interviews with my mom and her parents - not writing down a family history as interesting as mine (a penniless immigrant, a suicide, anti-semitism experienced, racism acted upon) would be unconcinable. Except spelled right.

:: 4:41 PM [+] ::

So I finally got a weblog.

So...

You know, it actually is possible to surf with only the keyboard. They said it wasn't on Tech TV very late at night a couple days ago--and, voila, I found myself forced, a couple hours later, to dispense with the mouse by an error that made the little round arrow thing stick permantly in place, refusing to change back into an arrow or act like one. I couldn't reset the computer beacuse it was my mom's (my own is upstairs sitting in isolation from the rest of the world) and I need her password to get on the net. So I spent two early morning hours browsing Turing Test transcripts and random cyberphilosophy webpages with alt, tab, F6, the arrow keys, and the spacebar.

Pathetic. But sort of zen.

I'm learning programming in my spare time. Neat, eh? They say it's best to start with Python (except for those who say it's best to start with C++, but their opinions are discarded as their language isn't named after a funny show), so I am, and it's--yes--neat. Getting a feel for the sytax. Nice, somewhat grammatically-challenged tutorial at a page I don't feel like digging up the URL for.

You can tell I'm writing this late at night, can't you? Better just cut and paste a really nice explanation I wrote about how entropy differs from chaos. Really, it's nice. Read it. If you don't like it you can send me a bitter email.

. . .

Pretend you have one of those "Store of Knowledge" type gizmos consisting of a bit of water and multicolored sand between two thin sheets of glass, placed in a framework that allows it to be turned upside down. The sand is all together, neatly arranged in perfectly straight bands of decreasing luminosity, with the water above it (and perhpaps a thin layer of air above that). It's okay to look at, but nothing special. It's also a very low entropy system.

Now turn it upside down. The sand floats from what is now the top through the water, with the different colors (which, you see now, are also different sizes of grain) falling at slightly different speeds. Entropy! The patterns traced by the sand are complex, beautiful. The finishing swirls as the final grains settle are cool-looking. The perfectly straight lines are replaced with intreaging, complex, non-random patterns generated by the interacting particles as they fell. Complexity has increased.

If you shake the gizmo enough, perhaps the sand will mix together completely, leaving a uniform sludge: entropy's maximum destroys complexity--but so does entropy's minimum; there wasn't much that was interesting in the set of parallel sand bands.

States of very high and very low entropy often have much in common. In the beginning, the universe (under current theories) was in a state of total non-entropy, an ultadense, completely uniform pinprick in which all mass and energy were concentrated. The big bang occured, the turning upside down of the gizmo, and the matter and energy (the universe itself, to be more precise) exploded outward, degrading entropically but at the same time increasing in complexity. In the end, trillions of years hence, the universe will approach the uniform sludge of the overshaken gizmo; in the meantime, there are beautiful sand patters: atoms, galaxies, stars, planets, Earth, life, and people.

:: 2:20 AM [+] ::