Waxing and waning before an upcoming storm

That phrase means absolutely nothing.

No, don't try to figure it out, I know you are, but stop.

That phrase, really, really meant nothing. Well, maybe there's some subconscious... no I'm not going to entertain any speculation here.

But if I were, I would say it has to do with the off-feeling I'm having thinking about my upcoming move. After delaying even looking for quite a while, suddenly everything's come together and... well, and now things are happening.

That's a bit different than how things have been for the last say 5-6 months, where my life was dominated by my job but otherwise didn't really change. And now it is.

Which raises many questions about to what degree I ought weight my job in my life now, and what of the people at my job, and what of the people outside of my job, and what of all the thoughts and plans I had based on skirting the weight of my job + commute now that the latter is gone...

Yet while previously, the impact of my wondering, to prompt the start of my motions toward actions, which might fizzle out before anything solid materialized, was rather large compared to the average eventful-ness of me just living my life, now compared to the almost auto-unfolding events, my wonderings seem almost idle.

I suppose there's a little fright here. And then there are matters unsettled from the last few months. And then there's a little sadness.

Leaving home, where everyone knew my name and I was always needed, to go to...

Jersey City...

but then again, Jersey City does seem to rule.

And so, despite pings of nostalgia I now move forward and face my ch-ch-changes (and here are the lyrics for that song as well)

And just so you don't suspect that I've become any less awesome... let's dance!

I think there is a point here that you are missing

In my humble opinion it is this:

I'm not listening!

Many may at first suspect me the anti-punk. I am generally respectful others, highly religious, have a good relationship with my various family members, observant of many traditions, politically eclectic but with a tendency toward what could be said to be conservatism.

But hell, when you say "I'm not going to fall in line/become another casualty of comformity", damn it, then I got to jump in the mosh pit (metaphorically, since I don't get out to concerts that often and usually get enough unnecessary touchy-feely time with strangers from the PATH trains).

On the other hand maybe I'm just in love with that sense of power of being able to say the hell with it all... though I suppose I don't, but that sense...

But then again maybe it's just the music, because music is awesome, musically speaking.

So take it to your head, take it to your heart and remember Rand rocks. Goodnight Folks!

And God Bless.

To Africa, I think

There was once a great book I read, that I think may have been called The Well of Worlds. I checked it out from the Princeton Public Library once a long time ago, but it doesn't seem to be on amazon or heard of anywhere. Nor can I locate it on the PPL catalog. One afternoon I will have to make a dedicated search for it, but the book was quite impressive in several regards. Most obviously it had a complex and fascinating alternate history scenario which posited a continuing Aztec Empire, and rising powers in Africa in the 19th century. (that summary does ill-service to the ideas, however, describing them more precisely would require the book itself or at least a good deal more time to search my memory)

But the book was also outstanding on a character level, and the main character was a bit of a rake, who fell in love, pursued his love, but his rakish-ness got in the way again and then... and then his love, as filled with ambition as he was, decided to head to Africa to see the new kingdoms modernizing and advancing, and he decides to head that way as well, the book ending on a chapter called "To Africa, I think" or something of the like.

I mention that because today was completed SEACOM, the beginning of cheap high-speed internet access in Africa. Given that cell-phone technology has already been utilized successfully, to an extend beyond many areas of the Western World, in Africa to enhance communications, this is an immense potential boon to the continent and opens all sorts of opportunities for productive innovation that could help millions in the long run and...

Maybe a little bit of a hyperbole, but this forces me to ask myself... why am I here?

Of course, I have answers, family, friends, danger enhanced by mental illness, danger posed by mental illness, the financial cost of mental illness, etc., and when I'm rational about it, I know that if I wanted to plop myself down in the middle of nowhere and start improving things, well, it would require immense sacrifice, immense risk, immense distress to my loved ones, and carry a very low chance of success.

So I'm not going to run out to Africa anytime soon. But I do believe we'll see some rising innovations there and some amazing progress in the next few decades, if God wills it (please Lord help the people of Africa, and help us all, your weak and sinful servants). And so I still look wistfully at times to the East, and there are times when I wonder if when my circumstances are different (for they have been and continue to be dynamic, though in ways sometimes hard to tell), will I pick up a suitcase and say...

"To Africa, I think."

So take it to your head, take it to your heart and remember Rand rocks. Goodnight Folks!

And God Bless.

A meditation on Archimedes to satisfy the needy

Why Archimedes is Awesome

• Started calculus
  
• Made the best estimate of pi up to that time
  
• Was completely in love with math
  

Archimedes has always been a figure who impressed and intrigued me. I got an opportunity in 11th grade to really explore him and that led me to writing an essay on him and the depth of his love of math. His life is a model of beautiful passion, something we are all capable of but which many of us are afraid to explore.

Eureka!
An essay for American Literature class

Written 1/1/02

Few men have understood the glory of living. Thorton Wilder calls those few “poets and saints.” While not all poets and not all great men truly understand this glory, some understand and that is what compels them to do great things. They understand that every moment is worthwhile, that the grimmest part of life is still life and is still beautiful. Most will never have that understanding, most understand only after they can look back on their entire life, and that can only happen at death. “It takes life to love Life,” Edgar Lee Masters once wrote. And for most that is true, but for a very few, understanding comes naturally and it makes them glorious. One of these great men was Archimedes¹ of Syracuse. He was an ancient Greek mathematician, considered to be one of the three greatest mathematicians of all time² (Golba, online). He revolutionized math in the ancient world and his contributions directly inspired new discoveries more than a 1000 years after his death. The elegance and beauty of math and pure logic amazed him. He was always contemplating the magnifigance of the universe in his symbols and numbers. He loved truth, understanding, and figuring out things. Math was his passion and he served his passion well (O’Connor and Robertson, online). Archimedes will always be remembered, because he could connect a grain of sand with the universe, and figure the mind of God plus or minus a sin function. Archimedes understood the beauty of life and that made him a very great man.

Archimedes was born around the year 287 BC. His father, Phidias, was a Greek astronomer, and he raised him in a house of math (Bendick 1). His city was Syracuse, a major city on Sicily, and a bustling seaport. He was likely related to the king of Syracuse, King Hiero II (Rorres, online). This suggests that he was moderately wealthy and so it’s not surprising he had enough to travel to Alexandria to study math in all its shapes and forms (Bendick 24). Math as a science was just beginning (Benedick 16). However, it was growing and mathematicians were gathering their information together in Alexandria; thus started for the first time a mathematical community (Bendick 26). Archimedes joined this community and dug in to every field he could. This was the beginning of Archimedes’ long and amazing career in math. He began sending out work to his colleages and gained a reputation for being top-notch. He eventually left Alexandria, leaving behind a considerable legacy including the Archimedes screw, an irrigation device (O’Connor and Robertson, online). He returned to Syracuse, but his math work did not stop. He became an expert engineer, revolutionizing the field of the lever, creating pulleys upon pulleys upon pulleys, and building some of the largest catapults the world had ever seen. He even once created, some say, a reflective mirror that burned enemy ships (Rorres, online). Most of his inventions went straight to the war room where King Hiero and his successors used them in Syracuse’s ongoing wars with Rome, a power just beginning to bloom (Golba, online). Archimedes’ inventions³ saved Syracuse the initially from a powerful seige, but Syracuse was taken by a suprise attack by Rome and was conquered (Rorres, online). Archimedes died when Rome took over Syracuse, killed by a soldier, despite orders that said to spare the mathematician’s life (Bendick 128).

While Archimedes was known for his inventions, that wasn’t his field of choice (Golba, online). His greatest works were in the fields of arithmetic, geometry, and physics. Nine of his works have survived, On plane equilibriums (two books), Quadrature of the parabola, On the sphere and cylinder⁴ (two books), On spirals, On conoids and spheroids, On floating bodies (two books), Measurement of a circle⁵, The Method, and The Sandreckoner. It is known that he did much more; his name is used in many, many works of his contemporaries and his successors. He developed the basis of integral calculus, he examined every geometric shape from the spiral to the circle. And yet Archimedes also treasured the ideas of others, using some of the newest of the time, like the sun-centered universe⁶ (O’Connor and Robertson, online). He loved ideas and the truth. Archimedes went far beyond just proving new math to be true, he wrote his methods down for the ages, and he also invented a new numeral system to express numbers that Greek numerals couldn’t. This number system came in handy when Archimedes calculated the number of sands of grain needed to fill the universe⁷, or at least the concept of the universe at the time (O’Connor and Benedict, online). This was not practical but it was a work of love, for Archimedes truly treasured the order and logic of the universe through math.

Archimedes’ art was math and he loved his art. Yet math is not an art of creation, it is an art of discovery. The laws of math have been true since the beginning of existence and Archimedes reveled in them. He would go without eating, start scribbling while bathing, writing down math as fast as he could. If he could ever find a surface to draw upon, even if it was simply the dirt with a twig he would start drawing figures (Golba, online). In the end these figures led to his death. Accounts of his death⁸ claim that he was scribbling math in the dust during the invasion of Syracuse when he was confronted by a Roman soldier, he told the soldier “don’t disturb my figures” and the enraged soldier killed him (Rorres, online). Archimedes was in such rapture about the joys of discovering new truth that he did not noticed the burning of his city around him. He did love his city and gave it some of his finest inventions, but math was his true love and so he could not waste time fretting over a city when the secrets of the universe were at stake. It was through this love that he loved life. He found that the universe had in it unlimited wonder and was continuously trying to find that wonder through math. His love of math was his love of life, his math was but an expression of life’s logic. Archimedes worked to his last moment, savoring every second, and then died forever a mathematician in love with the order of the universe.

Archimedes lived a life of math. Being a mathematician was nothing special especially with an astronomer for a father. Yet he is the greatest of all the mathematicians of antiquity, perhaps of all time. He figured out the relationship between the volumes of a sphere and a cylinder, he figured out the workings of water displacement, he understood the secrets of conics and a great deal more (Rorres, online). He was great, but what drove him was a love of math. This love of math was a forever wonder about the mysteries of life, and in this way Archimedes understood life.

1-Archimedes was his full name, most Greeks only had one name (Bendick 1)

2- The other two are Newton and Gauss (Golba online)

3-In addition to the inventions already mentioned Archimedes employed a large metal contraption that would rake ships at sea, he also booby traped the walls of Syracuse (Rorres, online)

4-This work concerned the ratio between the two and Archimedes requested that ratio be engraved on the door of his tomb (Golba, online)

5-In this book he calculated the most accurate pi at the time (Bendick 91)

6-Archimedes used the universe constructed by his father, Eudoxus, and Aristarchus, (O’Connor and Robertson, online). He later made a mechanical model of this universe that lasted 200 yr.s (Benedict 78)

7-the number of grains needed to fill the universe is approximately 8*10^16 (O’Connor and Robertson, online)

8-One account says he was carrying mathematical equiment that looked like gold and that is why he was killed (Rorres, online)

Works Cited

Bendick, Jeanne. Archimedes and the Door of Science. Warsaw, North Dakota: Bethlehem Books. 1995.

O’Connor, J. J., Robertson, E. F. “Archimedes of Syracuse.” January, 1999. University of St.Andrews. Online. Internet. Dec 21, 2001.

Golba, Paula. “Archimedes.” 1994. Interactive Real Analysis, ver. 1.9.3. Online. Internet. Dec 21, 2001.

Rorres, Chris. “Archimedes Home Page.” 1995. Drexel University. Online. Internet. Dec 21, 2001.

Good Archimedes links

Good overview

Lots of info

A Good starter

Archimedes writings

Live and let doom

I must say Twitter has treated me very well. Although I still have questions about the format and about the ultimate viability of the business, it has been good to me, regularly bringing in far more readers than my actual blog.

But that fills me with a twinge of regret.

Originally the Twitter feed was a way to build views + get out my scattered thoughts, to build views and allow me to concentrate the most of my energies to big power-posts + crazy-zany posts + just general Rand-ish awesomeness.

Yet the oft-expected Second Renaissance did not arrive. Well, actually by now I'm on my third or forth Renaissance or so (though to be fair, may consider there to be several Renaissances, usually linked with the different streams of Classical knowledge coming in, ie, Irish monks 9th c., Sicilian/Spanish Muslims 11/12th c., Greek refugees + Italian loot 14th c., and so on.).

Perhaps, this goes back to an old lesson, taught to me time and time again, though most grossly during a period of stomach virus where I could not drink a full glass of water without throwing up.

When in a situation of where your opportunities are scarce, do as much as you can, whenever you can.

Big plans of an integrated social media strategy don't really fit into that space, as it refuses to realize the scarcity of time.

And while I RAND THE GREAT AND GLORIOUS! do refuse reality's dictates, I must on occasion play by its rules to subvert it, and time is often a rule I must bend to... so then...

So then as much as I can whenever I can. Thus Twittering, thus posting up sessions that might just be a paragraph or two. Thus trying to find time to write and draw and submit work to publication, even though I can't make a regular schedule of things just yet.

But one fine day...

Well, no, that isn't the proper sentiment. What I'm speaking of is not an acceptance of a life far less than what I want, and just trying to deal with it. If that were the case, wouldn't altering the life to be more like I want fit into the equation? No, this is an understanding that I am not where I want, but I have found a path that I think will get me there, but in the meantime I'm not inclined to play dead, nor to simply roar in frustration at the lack of steady order to my gains and losses. Rather, if I cannot yet conquer the world, I will conquer this and that, a country or two, and perhaps the city of Worms. And I will do good work while I'm at it, and I will put myself in a better position for grander dreams, or so I hope.

But in the end, all of that is still a bit of a means to an end, the happy note is that in the pursuit of that means, or rather in doing so in the correct way, I am in achievement of that end:

That is striving to be a servant of God, as best I can, whenever I can.

After all, that is the course of a holy fool.

So take it to your head, take it to your heart, and remember Rand rocks. Goodnight Folks!

And God Bless.

And when I am freedom will I be a waving flag?

Once again, I am referencing K'naan's superb song, Wavin' Flag. Sometime I'll break down the lyrics and point out possible references to K'naan's native Somalia and the awful situation there, but I would probably need to do a little prep work before that. One must not claim historical authority when writing on a topic without some backing.

Yet I often find myself drawn to that song because it speaks to freedom, something dear to my heart. Of course, freedom is hard to define, and one definition, which I reject as illusionary is that freedom can only be achieved through the loosening of bonds and obligations. I find that a perverse philosophy that leads only to self-nullification.

However, I find myself dangerously close to that place.

Out of college, secure job-wise, more money than I really know what to do with, and with most of my siblings established in independent lives, most of the old obligations that once bound me are fading. Those that remain, to my Church Youth Group, to my parents' vision for my life, to tradition, etc. are actually somewhat loose, though at times they seem to snap tight at me, and I, on occasion, find that to follow them too strictly or too fully would be diluting of who I am or simply unnecessarily painful. Still I make an effort, though probably I ought to make more, but if those are the only obligating forces in my life, well, I'm likely to find my life rather shallow and unhappy.

And then what of Rand, the great and glorious? What of that greatness and glory? Well I am a student of False Bravado and do believe in great and grand dreams. I am also ever the fan of the fairer gender. And while both these topics seem out of reach at times, they are something to aim for, and that aiming does bring some obligating force, some urgency to life.

Except...

Except, all that urgency centers around me. Yes, it centers around me doing good stuff and being good to people, but the central notion is that I have some gift to share with the world, or at least some specialness to share with a wife, and sometimes it's hard to maintain that. Consciously, I can tell myself that, but in the chemical roots of my emotion, boiling through my subconscious into my doubts and self-hatred, I don't instinctively believe in myself. Heck, I don't instinctively believe I deserve to live, but I think I've pushed that pretty far down (though the meds help, but always, all good things flow from God (but more on that below).

So I'm left with a struggle with my subconscious, which undermines my efforts and makes it far more difficult to cite some proof against my doubts.

But all of that... that's crap...

Let me make something clear. We are not dictated our natures by our emotions. My chemical imbalances do not have a right to grant or deny my future. They effect things certainly, but the fundamental decisions of life are made by ourselves. And by God, who then gives us a choice to follow Him. The choice isn't always spelled out in directly religious terms, after all, you can have the faith to move mountains, but if you do not have Love, you have nothing. Love, I believe a choice to follow Love, not as a particular relationship or circumstance, not as a simple emotion or need, but as an ideal, as a cause, as a force, as beyond description... that is the path of God.

That's my urgency. And from that flows my ambitions (though focused by what I believe God wants for me) and from that flows my belief in romance (for if nothing else, romance is a beautiful work of God's great art) and from that flows my love for people (in God's image, what else do I need to say?) and from that flows a belief in myself...

I feel tempted to hate myself at times, at times to be apathetic and uncaring toward myself, but while I try to steer away from self-centerness and arrogance, I can confidently say that I am loved by God. Personally, passionately, infinitely. God even sent his Son to die for me. Yes, this is the Love offered to all mankind, but God has no limit and neither has His Love. And if God deems me worthy of love, who am I to disagree?

This is my belief, and this is a religious one, but to those of different religions or the non-religious let me point this out. If you are capable of love, you are capable of something immensely, infinitely beautiful. Don't doubt your self-worth, don't even consider throwing it away. Even if it doesn't seem that way at times, everyone has a capability for love, even if they choose not to use it, or choose not to see it. And that makes us worthy, beautiful, and gives us an obligation to spread love.

After all, if Love is to conquer all, why not we do the conquering for it?

Perhaps I do not fully mean this, but here's a statement capturing the ideal to which I aim.

I love you all, take care of yourselves and each other.
(not that I won't be doing that myself, lest you mistake me for someone using that classic goodbye, I am not going anywhere, at least I don't think so, at least not profoundly, at least not yet)

So take it to your head, take it to your heart, and remember Rand rocks. Goodnight Folks!

And God Bless.

Because Doom don't go away

So I suppose I ought to announce a grand re-entrance to the world of ambition and worries. That is I have faced the life in the moment and decided to exist outside of time. And so on...

Essentially, I've re-embraced my philosophy of false bravado and fool-dom.

But the danger, which I find myself bouncing back and forth from, is that it is not enough to want to be the fool, one must believe one can want to be the fool.

This was essentially my difficulty with living in the moment.

By instinct I believe not in my self, and even with my conscious determined false bravado...
And thus just in the moment I can't remind myself to believe it and...

But in the end, it's alright and it's okay and I'm awesome... RAND RULES!!!