2003-07-03 - 9:29 a.m.

The hand of god in a bowl of cheerios. That's what I experienced this sunny

vacation morning. After getting up at 4:50 to let the puppy outside, I stayed

out for a while to enjoy the sunrise. It's been a while since I did that, but

it used to be a lot easier to watch since it was at 7:30. Afterwards I tried

to sleep again but my thoughts were too full of yesterday since it was such an

amazing day. (I really should have written about the water park experience

since it was one of the happiest days of my life, but I picked up a cool rock

to remember the day by so I didn't really need an entry.) So I ended up back

outside with Jackson, the not-quite-9-weeks old chocolate lab puppy that my

friend Dennis bought the day after I got here for my week-long visit.

Jackson rocks. He found a stick to chew on today and watching him try to

master lunging at it with his mouth while attempting to retain control of all

4 limbs at the same time was definitely worth being up before 7 for. I sat

and smoked a bowl and then watching this puppy cavort around while I tsked and

picked up the trash left all over the place, including of course that old

standy of children's amusement areas, broken glass. Jackson didn't hurt

himself though, he just had a blast trying to master the different shapes

presented by bleachers. There was a ledge running down from the front of them

that was the highest thing he's climbed yet. He scooted up it on his belly,

scraping along with flailing hind legs. Congratulations ensued :o)

Then I spotted a girl cleaning the pool nearby. I said to him, "Jackson,

you're going to make me a friend" as I put the leash on him and headed over.

I tried to look nonchalant, like it was accidental that I ended up near her.

Of course she looked up and smiled cause of the puppy... too bad that she was

so young though :o( Sigh.

I need a 27 year old girl who likes to pick up rocks. Someone who has music in

their soul and a bright light shining in their minds.

Anyway, that's something I should remember to do when I think of the quality

I'm looking for.. just add slowly to the list. I have a good overall idea of

who I'm looking for, but sometimes I just get a moment of clarity where a good

expressive sentence comes along and I know it's just right. It's too bad so

many of those get forgotten. I should buy a mini notebook. Pah. I don't do

my diary reviews anymore so I won't reread this anyway :o/

But to get back on track, I came home with Jackson and then got out the soy

milk for a hearty bowl of cheerios. Gawsh darn it, ain't that just so

speshul? But yes, cheerios it was, and in these tiny tori of grain, I found a

revelation in my brain. Heheh.. time for the Dr Seuss physics primer ;o) But

really, the cheerios were floating in the last of the milk and I noticed how

quite a few were double o's, looking like a figure 8. Actually, there were

three of them in a row and they were on their side, so like triple infinity.

Some were in a triangle, all three together, you know obviously they are going

to form a hex pattern, but still I wondered why exactly there was so much

order going on here. As I watched, straggling singletons were sucked in to

the bodies of main groups through magical soy-milk-buoyant-cheerio gravity.

Some of the groups were blocks of hex-packed opti-cheerios, and others were

long straggly lines of protei-rios. Most amazing of all were two groups of

packed hexagons that formed side by side, then stayed exactly one row apart,

one cheerio-line width gap, and yet were exactly lined up with each other as

if the gap was filled in.

Another trio floated by in the shape of a water molecule. It seems there's a

balance point there where the two outer edge cheerios don't feel enough

pressure toward each other to make the trio into a triangle. Not only that,

but there's a counterforce or local minimum in pressure, that binds it into

that flying-v shape. Well, a squashed flying v, upside down. Maybe an upside

down flying v coming in for a crash landing, with the landing gear bending

outward. Anyway...

So I got to thinking about how such elegant, well-behaved order emerged from

such an unscripted and random pouring of cheerios and milk into a bowl. With

no intelligent force at work to shape the outcome, still the cheerios managed

to attain a formation that represented just 1 out of 2^70 possible

arrangements of cheerios. Well, there's the hand of god right there. Not the

god that nutjobs go into glass houses to pretend supplication to, the god that

implements the laws of physics. That daemon that carries out the inevitable

work, the chemical reactions of legions of atoms, in turn caused by the

gravitic interactions of still more elementary particles. Well, it could just

be viewed as what had to happen anyway, but we all know how humans like to

personify things, so why not give a name to this natural phenomenon.

And since other, certainly more cerebrally endowed (since they *know* they are

right) members of our species have elaborately and exhaustively argued that

such an astounding amount of order coming out of such a random and chaotic

initial conditions must mean that there was an intelligent hand at work in my

bowl of cheerios, I hereby claim to have found "God".

ps just to dig a little, I also claim to be able to call up god on demand. In

my bowl of cheerios, of course. Or yours, if you choose to be the master.

Muahaha. Muahaha. MuahHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAH!

pps I renewed my books on time.. just. I phoned last night, the day they were due :o) I'm a good boy.

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