Okay, I'm an early adapter on a lot of things (Kindle for instance), and I've been seeking the perfect umbrella for years, so this naturally caught my attention: http://www.nubrella.com/
This may be the greatest invention in the realm of umbrellas in a century...or not. It's hands-free (plus 10 points), it covers you much better than a conventional umbrella, at least the upper body (plus 5 points), it weighs 2.5 pounds and only folds down to the size of a small pup tent (minus 5 points), it makes you look like some kind of incredibly lame dinosaurish creature wearing a Darth Vader helmet (minus infinity).
Maybe I'm wrong. Anyone out there buy one of these things yet? Still married after?
Just curious.
The Kindlemonk
Monday, February 25, 2008
Entropy
I must admit that I never understood entropy before. I've always heard the classic 'messy room' metaphor about it, and it never really explained anything for me. Now I'm reading Decoding the Universe by Charles Seife on my Kindle. I finally understand entropy, or at least have a slight acquaintance with it. What really struck me is that this is a fundamental concept of reality. To not understand entropy is to be a flat-earther and not know it. For me, a person who conceptualizes most everything based on the Yi Jing Oracle (I Ching), there is a clear example of entropy in the mechanism of asking the Oracle a question. A small set of changes can have a very low entropy. For instance all six lines of the gua (hexagram) could come out Yang. This is common enough, but if we were to extend that run to 1024 Yang lines in succession the odds against the event are far greater than, for instance, the atoms in the known universe. So high entropy applies universally to large sets of objects (like 1024 castings of Yi Jing lines), but entropy can be 'reversed' in small sets. But then I thought of how, when a person receives a reading, the first thing they do is to interpret it. This moves the entropy back up. In the physics metaphor the material of the Yi is mixed with reality, diffusing into it until high entropy is achieved.
It is interesting in this light that the King Wen arrangement (the traditional order of the hexagrams to be found in most editions of the Yi Jing), goes from low entropy (all Yang, all Yin), to a perfect alternation of Yin and Yang in the last two hexagrams, which is the point of maximum entropy for a hexagram.
As an aside, why on earth isn't there more fanfare about Claude Shannon? The man was on the level of a Turing or an Einstein by his creation of information theory, but this book I'm reading is the first I'd heard of him (ok, so I've been living under a rock). The man created an 'electro-mechanical mouse' in 1950, that had enough AI to learn elements of a maze for goodness sake. In 1950! Another Da Vinci-level mind left us in 2001, and I never even knew about him. Sigh.
It is interesting in this light that the King Wen arrangement (the traditional order of the hexagrams to be found in most editions of the Yi Jing), goes from low entropy (all Yang, all Yin), to a perfect alternation of Yin and Yang in the last two hexagrams, which is the point of maximum entropy for a hexagram.
As an aside, why on earth isn't there more fanfare about Claude Shannon? The man was on the level of a Turing or an Einstein by his creation of information theory, but this book I'm reading is the first I'd heard of him (ok, so I've been living under a rock). The man created an 'electro-mechanical mouse' in 1950, that had enough AI to learn elements of a maze for goodness sake. In 1950! Another Da Vinci-level mind left us in 2001, and I never even knew about him. Sigh.
Friday, February 8, 2008
Revealed! Kindle 2.0 Design
This image was leaked today from the team working on the Kindle 2.0 design. Not satisfied with the current look, which was produced by the same group that brings us Kenmore refrigerators, the Amazon team has gone decidedly more retro.The Kindlemonk
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Fiction: A Shallow Perception
A Shallow Perception
Charles Vremyanov discovered his unusual perception one day at the dinner table. His wife waved her fingers up and down to illustrate some point in the conversation. Charles shuddered and groaned, but was unable to explain his reaction to his puzzled wife for several minutes. In his mind her fingers were the legs of spiders. He could see them, all at once, billions of spiders underground, billions more in the corners of houses, in towers. As if this dramatic, almost palpable perception wasn't enough, Charles could also 'see' their surroundings. There are people who can 'see' sounds as colors. Charles, a married, settled, bureaucrat of 38 uneventful years could see hidden, dreadful places all over the earth. He sighed once, his shoulders slumping and head drooping forward, but he did not faint. His wife, now thoroughly frightened, came over from their dinner sizzling on the range and touched his shoulder. As if a spell had been broken, Charles sat up and looked around, bewildered, but fully aware.
'Charles!', Tracy called out to him, melodramatically to his ears, 'What's wrong? What happened?'
'I just had the most peculiar, um..' He debated how to describe the last few seconds. He understood now that he had seen every spider in the world with its legs raised at the particular angle at which Tracy's fingers had been at the top of the arc of her gesture. All of them were rearing back. He shuddered again, briefly, at one in particular spider, that was in the eye socket of a skull in a dim and mossy chamber in South America.
'I had a strange, um, chill.'
He had wanted to say 'vision', but was instinctively reluctant to describe the event to his wife.
Charles stood, turned, and very stiffly said: 'I think I'll watch some TV.' He walked out of the kitchen and sat down on the leather sofa in their family room. His wife, head tilted to one side like a puzzled bird, stared at him from the kitchen.
Charles turned on the television, leaving it on the news channel from earlier in the morning, and settled back. How could he sense each individual spider? He knew where they were, he could see every detail of the spiders and what was in their view. And he could see each individual one simultaneously. With a jolt he realized why their legs were raised in defense. They were not hunted or hunting. They had all reared up and bared their fangs because they had seen Charles.
He woke up on the couch. It was after midnight. Tracy, as she always did, said with mock annoyance: 'Go sleep upstairs! Sleeping on the couch is bad for you. You don't want to get bronchitis again'. She was right, the family room was always cold in the winter and he could feel the chill in his lungs. She seemed to have forgotten the odd events of earlier in the evening altogether. He didn't remember eating dinner, which puzzled him even more.
Had it happened? At what point had his Saturday evening reality melded with a dream?
He struggled to his feet and headed for the bathroom, his usual first stop after a nap. At the bathroom door he remembered with annoyance the toilet was clogged and the plumber only due on Monday. Grumbling about 'this lousy old house', he walked down the basement stairs to the bathroom there. He felt 64 eyes focus on him from the corners of the basement. He could see each one of them and see its individual spider's eye view of the space. He felt their legs raise up as they spun, in unison, to face him as he came off the bottom step.
He woke up at the emergency room, in a little side room used to observe those who had been treated but were still in the limbo between being healthy and being admitted formally for the night.
'Charlie, you're awake!'
Charles thought to himself, 'My God, everything my wife is saying today has an exclamation point and sounds like it's in a soap opera dialog'.
'Um, yes. Why am I here?'
'You feel down the basement stairs. You hit your head and broke your wrist', at this she pointed at a cast on his right hand. 'The doctor's say you have a concussion. But the neurologist says it's probably not bad. We just have to come back if you feel nauseous.'
He felt bad for Tracy, all the ups and downs of the day, the strain of having her husband in danger, perhaps memories of his odd behavior at dinner, though he still hadn't sorted out a time line that was not merging with his nap.
Suddenly he sat bolt upright and smiled widely.
Tracy, once again, was melodramatically shocked.
Charles looked around the room, nodding his head to each of the three spiders in the area, creatures so tiny and discreet that they were living in the ventilation ducts of this supposedly sterile environment. He smiled as he planned his trip to South America to visit that little creature in the moldering skull, the one in the mossy room so full of golden tomb offerings that Charles could see them glint in the spider's vision in the near-total darkness.
He wasn't a bureaucrat anymore. He was a soon-to-be wealthy explorer.
The perception faded within a day.
Copyright 2008, The Kindlemonk
Charles Vremyanov discovered his unusual perception one day at the dinner table. His wife waved her fingers up and down to illustrate some point in the conversation. Charles shuddered and groaned, but was unable to explain his reaction to his puzzled wife for several minutes. In his mind her fingers were the legs of spiders. He could see them, all at once, billions of spiders underground, billions more in the corners of houses, in towers. As if this dramatic, almost palpable perception wasn't enough, Charles could also 'see' their surroundings. There are people who can 'see' sounds as colors. Charles, a married, settled, bureaucrat of 38 uneventful years could see hidden, dreadful places all over the earth. He sighed once, his shoulders slumping and head drooping forward, but he did not faint. His wife, now thoroughly frightened, came over from their dinner sizzling on the range and touched his shoulder. As if a spell had been broken, Charles sat up and looked around, bewildered, but fully aware.
'Charles!', Tracy called out to him, melodramatically to his ears, 'What's wrong? What happened?'
'I just had the most peculiar, um..' He debated how to describe the last few seconds. He understood now that he had seen every spider in the world with its legs raised at the particular angle at which Tracy's fingers had been at the top of the arc of her gesture. All of them were rearing back. He shuddered again, briefly, at one in particular spider, that was in the eye socket of a skull in a dim and mossy chamber in South America.
'I had a strange, um, chill.'
He had wanted to say 'vision', but was instinctively reluctant to describe the event to his wife.
Charles stood, turned, and very stiffly said: 'I think I'll watch some TV.' He walked out of the kitchen and sat down on the leather sofa in their family room. His wife, head tilted to one side like a puzzled bird, stared at him from the kitchen.
Charles turned on the television, leaving it on the news channel from earlier in the morning, and settled back. How could he sense each individual spider? He knew where they were, he could see every detail of the spiders and what was in their view. And he could see each individual one simultaneously. With a jolt he realized why their legs were raised in defense. They were not hunted or hunting. They had all reared up and bared their fangs because they had seen Charles.
He woke up on the couch. It was after midnight. Tracy, as she always did, said with mock annoyance: 'Go sleep upstairs! Sleeping on the couch is bad for you. You don't want to get bronchitis again'. She was right, the family room was always cold in the winter and he could feel the chill in his lungs. She seemed to have forgotten the odd events of earlier in the evening altogether. He didn't remember eating dinner, which puzzled him even more.
Had it happened? At what point had his Saturday evening reality melded with a dream?
He struggled to his feet and headed for the bathroom, his usual first stop after a nap. At the bathroom door he remembered with annoyance the toilet was clogged and the plumber only due on Monday. Grumbling about 'this lousy old house', he walked down the basement stairs to the bathroom there. He felt 64 eyes focus on him from the corners of the basement. He could see each one of them and see its individual spider's eye view of the space. He felt their legs raise up as they spun, in unison, to face him as he came off the bottom step.
He woke up at the emergency room, in a little side room used to observe those who had been treated but were still in the limbo between being healthy and being admitted formally for the night.
'Charlie, you're awake!'
Charles thought to himself, 'My God, everything my wife is saying today has an exclamation point and sounds like it's in a soap opera dialog'.
'Um, yes. Why am I here?'
'You feel down the basement stairs. You hit your head and broke your wrist', at this she pointed at a cast on his right hand. 'The doctor's say you have a concussion. But the neurologist says it's probably not bad. We just have to come back if you feel nauseous.'
He felt bad for Tracy, all the ups and downs of the day, the strain of having her husband in danger, perhaps memories of his odd behavior at dinner, though he still hadn't sorted out a time line that was not merging with his nap.
Suddenly he sat bolt upright and smiled widely.
Tracy, once again, was melodramatically shocked.
Charles looked around the room, nodding his head to each of the three spiders in the area, creatures so tiny and discreet that they were living in the ventilation ducts of this supposedly sterile environment. He smiled as he planned his trip to South America to visit that little creature in the moldering skull, the one in the mossy room so full of golden tomb offerings that Charles could see them glint in the spider's vision in the near-total darkness.
He wasn't a bureaucrat anymore. He was a soon-to-be wealthy explorer.
The perception faded within a day.
Copyright 2008, The Kindlemonk
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