2003-04-11 - 11:42 p.m.

Bah. Day 5 without internet. I'll still keep writing the entries, though :)

It's too much an important part of my life not to keep up with.

I'm tired. I'm... disappointed and depressed about my life. :( Yes, you

frown, Mr Upside down smile emoticon. Express my emotion to the world. I

like personifying things.

On the upside, I watched a wicked playoff game tonight. Detroit vs Anaheim had

me sitting on the edge of my seat. It was cool to realize that the actual

game was taking place less than an hour's drive from here, and I was seeing

everything live. I'd forgotten what "live" really means when you're watching

tv. The war reminded me. Now it was a cool feeling to realize how close I

was to the action, as it were; I could actually imagine the puck flying around

only 50 km away.

I'm always so impressed by these athletes' abilities. I step back mentally and

take the big picture: intelligent agents coordinating their actions as a team

while individually performing stunning feats of data gathering, intellectual

processing, and action execution. It's an amazing dance of complexity, far

more complex than the patterns that form in a nebula as a result of a

supernova, for instance, although those patterns can be undecipherably

complicated. These human patterns are many orders of magnitude closer to the

limit, though. Pushing the boundaries of chaos without ever leaving the world

of the rational. Cool.

I'm reading this book on the history of heat: "Warmth disperses and time

passes". Yeah, I know, kind of dry, but also kind of neat since now I know a

bit more of the background involved in the discovery of the laws of

thermodynamics. It always helps to understand things when you learn what

people were thinking about when they figured things out.

I'm bothered though by the author's complete lack of understanding of the

difference between randomness and chaos. Several times he uses the words

intechangeably, or worse, in the same phrase, as in "random chaos" or "chaotic

randomness". How much will future generations of scientists be delayed by our

pathetic lack of communication? Everyone in the scientific community should

have at least a passing familiarity with nonlinear systems theory. It affects

everything in our world so fundamentally that it's a shame so many people

don't understand it.

Also, I'm botherd by the author's insistence that particles move randomly.

Where is this randomness supposed to come from? Some unheard of force that

appears sporadically and influences matter? Why have I never heard of this

force? No, the motion of all particles (not that I believe in that term as it

is currently defined by most) obey completely the laws of electromagnetism and

behave exactly as they should. The only reason we don't know ahead of time

where they are all going is that a) we don't have enough information about

them (and can't) and b) their future paths are clouded by the same chaotic

fuzz that prevents weather forecasting more than a few days in advance. To

groundlessly suggest that particles move randomly bothers me immensely.

I'll still read the book. Next is "Marvels of the molecule". Hopefully that

one will be better (if I understand it enough to disagree with it, that is ;)

)

But seriously, for a book printed only 5 years ago, "Warmth disperses" doesn't

strike me as particularly accurate about fundamental aspects of physics and

math that related directly to its subject.

Enough. I have to sleep eventually. It is currently "Half past one". I was

suprised how much I missed Linux :)

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