The Devil Wears A Suit And Tie

Stardate 73155.1

Sol15

Earth date 9/9/2019

Today I try oat milk. Discovery: oat milk tastes very little like milk and very much like sad oatmeal.

Welcome to life on Mars

We are curvature.

If one thinks of life as a series of moments with good and bad wrapped into them, then is would life be worth living if the net sum of the good - bad was bad?

My initial gut feeling was yes, but as in mathematics we cannot just say things are so because of a gut feeling. After all, one could argue that my intuition says so, because the net sum of my moments has been positive.

Consider net happiness as being approximated by the riemann sum of the given good or bad of a set of adjacent short periods of time. Now take the limit of this as the change in time approaches 0. In short, I invite you to consider happiness as the integral of some curve. Where the curve is defined by f(t)=lifes instantaneous happy levels (positive or negative) and the area underneath which is net good/bad.

This is similar to how the integral of position with respect to time is displacement aka net change in position.

Now determining if life is worth living should be a nice integral of a function (which for most would be continuous) and a simple little apple of the fundamental theorem of calculus.

But consider this:

1. We dont know the bounds, so unless a nice little trick or assumption comes in we cant apply FTC. Also of one factors in considerations of life after life on Mars then this becomes an improper integral from 0 to infinity. If you believe that you are reborn then the bounds become negative infinity to infinity. Both very improper.

2. We don't know the function, so we cant integrate it.

3. Even if we could integrate it, we couldn't solve for C, so integrating f(t) as an indefinite integral would be pointless.

So what do we know?

We aren't very good judges of if things are getting better or worse at any given moment so we only have a very rough guess at the rate of change.

We aren't very observant, so we can only notice a few things at a time.

We really only know the moment that we are in, and not where we are going, and what's more I'd like to purpose that our lives are affected by more than one thing.

I purpose that we experience at any given moment the second derivative of the function of life, which is not simply f(t) but rather, a function of infinite (as many as necessary) variables. We know not where we are or where we are going, we dont know how the future will change us. We simply know where we are and have an idea of whether allong a particular direction we are concave up or down.

Life is a n'th dimensional hyperspace and we experience it as the curvature allong whatever path we trace allong whatever level surface we happen to have focused in on.

Aka, we experience life as the curvature (k, second partial derivative) of one level surface of it's n'th dimensional hyperspace.

So we don't know, but just the mere thought of riding allong this hyperspace brings a certain kind of satisfaction, and a unique quest for knowledge.

“Reality ...is FICTIONAL” -(Rainbow Kitten Surprise)

As the days pass and the news gets continually worse as restrictions come and go like the push and pull of the tide (or a sine wave), I find myself in a daze, feeling like this reality is closer to some distopian fiction than anything that could have ever been real....but it is. 

I find myself listening to music and dancing in my cubical of quarantine, because “Because there's nothing else to do” (Pulp, Common People). I danced classical ballet for many years, but lately I’m finding I need music that is far louder and more psychedelic. With that in mind... here’s a few songs that feel oddly fitting right now.

 “American Hero” by Rainbow Kitten Surprise

Because man does Reality seem Fictional Right Now

“Once in a Lifetime” by Talking Heads

How did we find ourselves here, I’m just “Letting the day’s go by”

“Common People” by Pulp

“watch your life slide out of view And then dance [...] Because there's nothing else to do

Anything by Tame Impala Especially 

“It might be time”

“Feels Like We Only Go Backwards (Artic Monkeys Cover of this is good too)

“The Less I Know The Better”

“Yesterday” by the Beatles 

My God, How is this not dystopian fiction? How is this not just a book I can toss aside? 

Stay Home if you can my friends. 

Dance in your dorm rooms. Binge watch television from your couch. Work out till you have abs as good as Angelina Joe Lee in Tomb Raider, then watch Angelina Joe Lee in Tomb Raider, then play some Tomb Raider. Skype your best friend and play two truths and a lie. Read the Martian (Andy Weir)... Twice, then Watch the Movie, then study aerospace engineering. Read “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” (Douglas Adams), complete edition (duh), then pretend you’re an alien for a day. Whatever you do, be safe my friends.  

Wasps in Engineering

This morning I awoke early, stirred from my rest by the sound of "Travel" playing at the time specified the night before to my personal device assistant. I reviewed thermodynamics in my quarters before dressing hastily and heading off a bit behind schedule, while consuming nourishment from a pre-packaged tube (Go-gurt). It was a day in the typical martian life.

Upon arriving however, I discovered a hoard of people crammed outside the room, rather than seated and chatting with as usual. Their exclamations were soon made clear. Our particular room in the Hab, was overrun by wasps. Why they were there, no one could say, perhaps the inhospitable conditions outside drove them in? Then again, whose to say why any of us were there.

Our executive Starfleet officer instructed us to not disturb them as they circled, otherwise activities continued as usual, pardoning the occasional interruption of a flying creature.

It seemed, contrary to popular belief, the redshirts were more afraid of the wasps then the wasps were of them.

Does it make sense?

There’s a caricature hanging on my wall, with it’s date marked as the 11th of September 2019. I look at it several times a day and wonder about my personal insensitivity. 

I sat for said caricature on said day, and truth be told I was smiling. 

I won’t attempt to justify my role in this. I was there, same as everyone else. I ate the food, same as everyone else. If we were wrong (and I believe we were) then I was wrong. 

The caricature in question was drawn at an institution event, a club fair, somewhat of a celebration. Isn’t it wrong? Wasn’t it wrong, to be at a celebration, at a military institution, on a day that marks a great American tragedy? That same night a remembrance ceremony took place. Doesn’t it pervert the nights remembrance ceremony to be hosting a celebration during the day that could have occurred on any other day? I won’t claim that people born on the 11th should’t celebrate their birthday, their births remind us that horrible things and good things can occur simultaneously. I do wonder about the justification of an institutions celebratory event. 

I will not pretend to remember 9/11. The fact is I simply don’t. I do not remember that day, nor any of that year. Regardless, it was a tragedy that affected an incredible number of Americans. I believe it was insensitive to hold the fair on that day and I have my sincere regrets about my part in it. 

A second event also occurred that seemed ill timed. 

A young man, about to graduate died on 9/15/19 in a car crash. Yesterday, 1 week later the institution held it’s 200th celebration. Today it held his funeral. I will not say that the institution should have altered it’s plans on such short notice, but I will say I believe they should have provided more than just 1 echo of his name as so many students mourn his loss and fight off anguish at the denial of half mast rights for the enlisted young man.   

Does it make sense? To What Degree Should We Mourn For Losses To Our Greater Community? 

Roller Coasters & Higher Education: The Hardest Part

I like roller coasters, at least sometimes, but they are designed to shake you, scare you a bit, give you an adrenaline rush, an experience, before they place you back on the ground. 

For me the hardest part of any roller coaster or amusement park ride is always waiting in line. Waiting in line is when you have a choice. Every moment I have to stand there, watching the ride, listening to the screams, I am making a conscious choice to get on the ride even as this new information is presented to me. My friends will get me into line, and once I am on the ride itself I put my faith in the safeties designed by the roller coaster engineer  and let my body be thrown from side to side. Loop da’ loops or dramatic three story high dives, locked into my seat the greatest stress is over and I can relax and enjoy the ride.

College too is designed to shake you a bit, give you an experience and place you back on the ground. And here too I find anticipation and decision stifling. I find the choosing of classes, the navigation of my non-standard course map to be a horribly straining task. I would rather just go forth and do, but I feel an obligation to myself to consider my options thoroughly. Issue is, I can’t see the future, there’s no way of knowing what option is truly best in the long run. It’s like being asked to solve for a variable, but being given an indeterminate matrix and some subjective phrases or playing 20 questions with only non distinct questions.  You just have to take your best guess and move on.   

The best laid plans of Martians  & “I think it’s gonna be a long long time”

I packed my bags tonight, pre-flight....

And everything went south from there, and not in the way I intended. 

After much deliberation and anticipation packed and climbed into my MAV. This was after, I should note, clearing the frozen Martian precipitation from my windshield. And yes, I know what you’re thinking ‘snow can’t fall on mars’, but due to the atmospheric regulations in this particular valley it does, and what was particularly relevant to me this afternoon was not the particulars of how this is possible but more the difficulty of clearing it from my vehicle. I did so in only the most sophisticated and intuitive manner (utalizing a baseball cap, sock and plastic butter knife when I discovered my car lacked a snow scraper). 

So at long last, I began the journey.

And then I had no breaks. I do not know what is wrong with them, and I wasn’t about to use my education in engineering to stand out in the cold and figure out how they work, or more accurately why they didn’t. I decided I was satisfied with sayin’ alive. 

So my night went south, without me actually making it any further south. Ah well “the best laid plans of mice and [martians] so often fall astray” (Burns, To A Mouse). I guess it’s gonna be “a long long time” before I get home again (Elton John, Rocket Man).

Technology's impact on those who pursue art or math. Good isn’t Good Enough.

First off, I would like to preface this piece of writing with a disclaimer. The ideas drafted here are just that, drafts. They are based purely on my views of the universe without external reasearch at this time.

All of that said...

Artists and Mathematicians, treated by the traditions academic structure as opposites far to often, are drawn together by some critical similarities. This piece will focus on just one of those similarities, how mathematical and artistic pursuits have changed with modern times. 

Proficiency in a set of mathematical or artistically based skills is incredibly useful and impressive to many who do not share those skills. Being able to balance a checkbook or represent something from life that someone else can recognize are both useful skills that many envy. These basic skills however, are mere tasks, that can in today’s age be completed by a computer. Many people have adopted the use of Microsoft’s Excel for keeping track of their financial transactions and generations worth of people now communicate via pictures taken on a smart phone. 

So what then, is the purpose of studying either mathematics or art, if in our day to day lives we will use some form of computer to preform many of the tasks that were once claimed as their uses by high school teachers everywhere. Years ago my teachers had already thought of that, the justification time after time being “You need to understand what the computer is doing”. I would not argue that that is an invalid explanation, especially for those who are not particularly interested in studying the subject. The real argument for either mathematics or art is advancement.