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| Apparently there was no good way to spin this one:
Also knocked out of the race on Tuesday was McEwen's teammate Christophe
Brandt. He was pulled over on the side of the road relieving himself when
a police moto hooked his bike's handlebars and launched him into the ditch.
Amazingly Brandt managed to finish the stage, but x-rays revealed a fracture
in his elbow and an end to his Giro.
http://www.velonews.com/race/int/articles/9845.0.html
I wonder what the cop said to the guy afterward?
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| So I discovered with this burst of warm weather and rain that there is a huge honeysuckle plant right outside my window. So for about three days now my room has had a pleasant smell every time a bit of a breeze wafts through. This has been a nice change.
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| So, I'm working on what could potentially be the last paper ever. Ever. Almost certainly the last paper I'll have to write in which I have to bring two novels into "conversation" over some issue or another.
Why can't I just do it? The fingers refuse to type, and the mind refuses to come up with anything worth typing anyway. I've outlined it about 3 times, but I can't seem to put it together. Hmph.
Multiple Universe theory... If I remember right, it exists because there's a major problem in our understanding of our own universe. At least scientifically. There are several constants, seven rings a bell but I'm not quite sure, which must be perfectly spot-on for the world to exist as we know it. For instance, if the gravitational forces between particles were ever so slightly larger, the universe would have collapsed back onto itself only moments after the Big Bang, hardly leaving time for the formation of life, and all that good stuff. Ever so slightly weaker, and the universe would have blown apart into a fine mist in which planets and stars and all that necessary stuff could never have combobulated (if that's a real word, I'll be impressed). I don't remember the others, but I'm sure one is the attraction force between charged particles. Anyway, these constants, if they weren't absolutely right (we're talking perfect to several decimal places out) there wouldn't be a universe. So the solution to this problem? There are two: a) God set the constants, and b) there are infinite universes in parallel dimensions, and in each the numbers for these important constants are jumbled a bit, and we're lucky enough to be in one of the viable universes. Interestingly, if there are infinite universes, that means there are a few (I say few, but actually there would be infinite, just fewer than the total; a smaller infinite, if you will) in which everything is exactly the same, up to now. But there also exists at least one for every time in your life where you (or anyone else) made an unpredictable decision. Like in back to the future when he goes forward in time to find out that that one guy (Buzz? I don't remember his name) found the baseball almanac from the future and has won loads of money betting on games. But then, I guess there's still choice a.
It's too bad I haven't already written my paper in this universe.
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| So I was thinking about "Met Randomly," as a way of describing your relationship to another person on Facebook. It occurred to me that most people use the word "random" to describe things that aren't really random, but which are relatively unlikely. Real randomness is really difficult to achieve, which early computer programmers discovered when they wanted a program to return a random number. The best we could do with BASIC (which for some reason we were still using in high school) was base the number off of the computer's clock, and the number it spat out was related to the time of day we asked. Hardly "random."
Then it occurred to me that everything I could think of happens as a result of something else happening. Cause and effect. If we take God out of the equation, we have a huge series of events, which if we had a big enough computer (this is probably an experiment that the mice are running right now) we ought to be able to predict exactly what will occur. Even life, which is made up of organic molecules and responds in a predictable way to stimuli. This seems true right down to personality, which is a result of genetic brain wiring and early nurturing environment, which is a result of other events based on other events, etc. So I couldn't figure out a way to plug "random" into this way of looking at things, just "extremely hard to predict." The only hang up I'm not sure about is that quantum mechanics might screw up my argument, since it deals with a lot of things having a certain probability of occurring and we don't really know how to predict beyond a certain expected range.
So try adding God. Many people, whether they really think about it or not, believe in some sort of predestination. Either they will say so explicitly, or implicitly in their belief system (God knows all, therefore God knows what will happen, therefore the events of my life are already laid out and must occur because God must be correct). Again we come back to a lack of randomness. The only difference between this idea and the previous is that with God around, there's a chance that things happen for a reason, rather than just because they had to happen as a result of cause and effect. A butterfly effect sort of thing.
So the odd conclusion is that on either side of the spectrum (God absent and God omni-present) there is no room for random. Which means that the events of my life will happen in a certain way, with only the illusion of free will. But, I'm still pretty happy with the impression that I make my own choices, and as the computer programmers decided, "hard to predict" is almost as good as "random." I still don't know what will happen tomorrow, which makes it worth waking up to find out.
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