Sinus Congestion On The High Seas

Some of the people who spend time in my field of view are such colorful characters that they demand formal documentation, much like Darwin upon discovery of a new species in the Gálapagos.

I once saw a lost mariner drowning in the disorientation that is solid land. Thin, small, middle-aged and unshaven, he scampered aimlessly, light-footed, and unbalanced, like Gollum. Wrapped round his neck hung a flickering strobe light, nicely juxtaposed by the well-lit building interior he occupied. While all of the aforementioned was visually interesting, it was perhaps outdone auditorily by the soundtrack to schizophrenia emanating from a short-wave radio he wore on his jacket: a repeating, static-riddled weather transmission "20 knot winds..kshh...80 nautical miles Northeast of Kodiak..kshh." He shouted gibberish into a phone that probably wasn't listening.

Coughing or sneezing in the vicinity of tens of sitting strangers begets more of the same from them. Lecture and concert halls are particularly vulnerable settings. When a period of audience silence is broken by a single nose/throat disturbance, one or two others in the audience usually follow suit, domino-like, in a reaction that on the surface mirrors the contagiousness of yawning. But where yawning is largely out of one's control and is motivated by some biological need, coughs or throat clearing that are 2nd or 3rd in a series are usually imparted onto the crowd on account of a primitive, petty consideration, as if to say "My respiratory tract air discharge is louder and more disruptive than yours, bitch." Thus, the source of the last outburst in a series is the silverback gorilla and dominates, until an irritated throat emboldens a lesser audience member to threaten the hierarchy. Importantly, there are two unspoken rules that limit the amount of disturbance an audience will tolerate.

1. The first disruption must be legitimate, as from an allergy or cold.
2. Back and forth battles are not allowed, any audience member wanting to show their stuff has only one opportunity to shine within a single disturbance series.

Movie theaters offer an interesting twist: the breaking of audience silence may be initiated by a character in the film. For example, when I saw The Road, several audience members felt their dominance threatened by the pneumonic father character's coughing fits.

Goddamn Religion

Before discarding as completely useless a belief you don't believe in, consider its worth as entertainment. Unproveable yet deeply held convictions, and variations on them, can represent fertile ground for quality daydreaming.

Consider the premise of an all-knowing god who orchestrates everything, from people's decisions to where on the ground a falling leaf will land. One implication is that diseases and natural disasters are similarly willed. When good people are subjected to suffering and untimely death, accusations that God is a fucked up bastard sit restlessly at the tip of the tongue, kept from being spoken by the fear of an eternal, hellish retribution.

Given Earth's large population, the intricacies of biology, and the plethora of activities that constitute modern living, each new day brings with it a nearly countless number of misfortune-yielding options from which this twisted fuck of a god can choose. The celebrated, centuries-old paintings rendering the god in human form give a green light to its personification and make it easy to imagine Him reclining in an easy chair considering an array of screens.

Let each screen display in real-time the current happenings in one person's life, such that the number of screens equals Earth's population. Powerful note that irrefutably and completely addresses a potential point of contention regarding this unlikely scenario: since He is God, He can process the continually evolving information on all of the screens simultaneously in a way that leaves supercomputers speechless. Also, let it be known that He, and all references to Him, receive a capital H (or G, if referred to by name), even in mid-sentence, because He is special (He rides the short bus to Sunday school).

Now then, back to the screens. It's natural to question how He decides which misfortune-yielding options to choose and which to pass up, but I don't think speculating on an answer adds anything to this daydream, so I'm ignoring it. As for why not all options are chosen, which would unleash maximum misfortune, well, "you have to build them up to tear them down."

What I find interesting is what must happen when He considers screens which display fast-paced activities like highway driving. For simplicity, consider just two screens: in one, God has the option of sending a deer running onto the road to be hit by a car, and in the other He has the option of willing a drunk driver to swerve into the oncoming lane at an unfortunate time. There are options within these options. For example, exact location of deer on road and whether or not it kicks up its hind legs to meet the windshield; call these 2nd order options, as opposed to 1st order.

Choosing one 1st order option (drunk swerve or deer run) over the other necessitates that each option's misfortune potential be evaluated at the same timestamp. Choosing to set in motion option A at time t=5 when option B's misfortune potential was evaluated at time t=6 is like comparing apples and running (thanks, wikipedia). To summarize, in this example there are two cars simultaneously traveling down highways at different locations on earth. In order to choose one unfortunate accident over the other, God must evaluate each 1st order's 2nd order options sequentially and beginning at the same timestamp each time.

Two notes:

1. Depending on the level of detail required, it's entirely possible to consider nth order options.
2. The option ultimately selected by God may not necessarily be the option with greatest misfortune potential, for reasons similar to those responsible for "you have to build them up to tear them down."

I thought I had come across a discrepancy. On one hand I'm saying God is capable of processing all incoming information from an array of screens equal in number to Earth's human population. On the other hand, I claim God must decide on a time in the future for initiating an option in order to allow ample time to evaluate each option's misfortune potential. At first, it seems that if God is capable of the former, the time required to evaluate each option's misfortune potential should be so small as to allow options to be chosen or discarded as soon as they are discovered. However, I no longer think there's a discrepancy. The information processing and option evaluation tasks must take place concurrently. The possibility that if all God's resources were moved from the former to the latter it might result in options being chosen/discarded upon discovery is irrelevant because option evaluation is occurring in addition to, not instead of, information processing.

Whether there is or isn't a discrepancy is not the point. The point is to daydream. Practically-minded individuals may want to link their daydreams with the "real" world. The above is relevant to closed systems. Feedback and feed-forward mechanisms require information processing and option evaluation.

Smoke, Sniff, or Syringe Inject

One of the staples of air travel is selling out to a corporate giant: every refreshment napkin received on this trip prominently featured Coca-Cola. Delta's napkins could've even come from a restaurant, as the airline had no presence on them whatsoever. Instead, two red coke bottles bordered by fireworks bursts and the words "open happiness" attempted to bait travelers into consuming the carbonated syrup. It's a fucking shame.

Bronze busts of dead war men look out over a memorial ground covered in white powder. The snow blowers weren't brave enough to defeat the metal post barriers and trespass onto pedestrian-only paths.

As our length of stay drags on, a sense of confinement grows stronger. Classmates with cars are targeted for superficial friendship. Soon, leaving the base daily becomes the norm. One night, we dine at the high noon, a quintessential, rustic, all-american feed-barn. In the bar on the other side of a separating wall, the evening's entertainment is karaoke. An unfortunate majority of the people with wheels are enthusiastic for the stage, so after plates are cleared we embark on a short migration and take new seats in the smokey, loud dive. One after another, serious amateurs predictably dismiss most of the available karaoke tracks in favor of crooning only those belonging to the country genre. While in the middle of a verse, one gentleman belches into the mic, an action that receives applause and nicely summarizes the ambiance.

Unwilling to shout above the noise, and aware that sitting quietly without participating in any sort of activity would draw annoying inquires regarding my well-being, I order a cocaine shooter to look after. In the interest of prolonging my drink's lifetime, I allow minutes to pass between taking sips gingerly. It tastes fine but could've used more coke. I stir it occasionally with the pair of narrow, red straws. Melting ice cubes dilute the top layer and keep it deliciously cold.

Visible Hearing Aids Encourage Loud Conversations --> Listen To The Nonverbals

The intended recipient of a solicitation for attention is made aware of the situation, and of their role in it, through means other than just the solicitor-spoken words.

Consider five people standing in a semi-circle formation, equidistant from, and with backs facing, a sixth person who shouts "Hey, you!" For ease of communicating the point, give the five semi-circulars different color shirts, and let the sixth person's exclamation be an address to the semi-circular wearing the green upper. Even though the outburst contains no words specifying which of the five it is directed towards, the green shirt wearer will have a stronger sense than the others that s/he is being spoken to.

This means that information is being encoded and transferred in more ways than by spoken language alone. On the surface, this conclusion should come as no surprise, as the sizable niche carved into common awareness for the notion of nonverbal communication can attest. Still, for all that the term could encompass based on a by definition perspective, in popular usage it refers singly to visible communication information.

But the green shirt wearer's strong sense that they're being spoken to can't be chalked up to visually captured information because they, like the other semi-circulars, have their back to the speaker. There's something else happening, neither auditory nor visual. It's akin to telekinesis' 2nd cousin.

Sea Life With Life Jackets and Fuselage

If you're drinking water, it feels like a liquid. Alternately, if you managed to escape through an emergency exit the cabin of a doomed ocean-crossing airplane but forgot to locate an unsupplied parachute, the calm waves feel more like cement when you land.

Let's take it to eleven: a sea otter floating on his back still feels as though he's partially submerged in a liquid, even as he watches your body splatter flat on the surface as if you had jumped out of a skyscraper and landed on Broadway Avenue. This example illustrates the concept of regions of experience, which I like to think of as a far-reaching phenomena that is at play in a great many areas. For example, I would consider the portion of special relativity dealing with the frames of reference of objects in motion to intersect the regions of experience phenomena. And, more than an intersection, the sea otter thought experiment belongs to a subset of the phenomena dealing with the perspective-dependence of water's state of matter. I don't know whether it's significant that the intersection and subset share speed as a fundamental component, but it's probably worth noting.

Establishing the fact that a person's perception of water as a liquid or solid depends on their speed prompts two questions:

1. If a person's body could withstand the hardships of flying hundreds of miles per hour through a large cloud, would the person feel as though they were underwater?

2. Does a high velocity object create an as yet undiscovered state of matter when it collides with a solid?

These questions assume that increasing velocity corresponds to the perception of matter moving in the gas-->liquid-->solid direction, as is suggested by what we know to be true in the falling airplane passenger case.

A note of clarification on question 2: given that the sea otter in the airplane example never perceives the water as a solid, any new state of matter beyond solid resulting from an object's collision with a solid would only be perceptible to the object itself.

If the answer to question 1 is true, one may wonder by extension whether flying through the cloud many times faster would result in traversing all the way to the other side of the states of matter spectrum, so that the perception was of colliding with a solid. If this is also true, and it likely is, then one can definitively say that a person can perceive a gas as any of the principle states of matter naturally occurring on earth and that their perception is a function of their speed relative to it. I add the 'principle states of matter' and 'naturally occurring on earth' qualifiers because plasma is the most common state of matter in the universe but accommodating it in this post would require excessive writing for only a small return on investment.

A final comment. We know that decreasing velocity doesn't correspond to the perception of matter in the solid-->liquid-->gas direction. Usually, you can obtain a physical behavior's opposite by reversing the math governing the behavior, but even adding a minus sign and making the velocity negative doesn't help in this case because we know that the speed-dependent gas-->liquid-->solid state of matter flow is independent of the direction of the person moving through the matter. Maybe Stephen Hawking can solve this asymmetry.