CalvinDude.com

You know, it’s interesting being a writer/musician/computer programmer/animator/etc. Basically, anything to do with the arts. There will be moments where I’ll be thinking on something that I want to write about–a story in my mind that stews for a bit, or a melody, or a visual picture of some movie shot I’d like to see. And what’s interesting is that most of the time when I do creative stuff, it exists in my mind in a very primative state.

Then out of the blue I get hit with inspiration.

A brief example will suffice I think. When I wrote The Outlaw (which I’ve no longer made available, BTW, since I’m going to work on a revision now that my writing is much more gooder), it took me a few weeks to do the first two “books” in it. Then, one Saturday in 1998, I sat down at around 11 AM and wrote non-stop until around 8 PM. During those 9 hours, I did the entire last book (which was approximately 30,000 words). Why? Because I knew exactly what I wanted, and it just shot out of me.

When I write music, it’s often the same way. I’m getting good enough to know chord structures in my mind before I even sit down to write music. I’ll be like, “I want to write something in E minor today.” And I’ll instantly think of Em - C- G - D (one of my favorite progressions) and suddenly there’s a melody there.

Today, it happened with both. I was sitting there minding my own business when a song leapt into my mind. While I currently lack the ability to record anything, I hammered it out on my guitar in about thirty minutes. The chords for this one are B5 - F#5 - A5 - E5 for the verse, and the chorus is B5* - A5* - E5* - B5* and the bridge section goes C#* - B5* - A5, which are tabbed:

Regular E-A-D-G-B-E tuning

 B5    F#5    A5   E5      B5*   A5*    E5*    C#*
----- ----- ----- -----  -----  -----  -----  -----
----- ----- ----- -----  -----  -----  -----  -----
--4-- ----- --2-- -----  -----  -----  --9--  -----
--4-- --4-- --2-- --2--  --9--  --7--  --9--  --11-
--2-- --4-- --0-- --2--  --9--  --7--  --7--  --11-
----- --2-- ----- --0--  --7--  --5--  -----  --9--

On this one I actually didn’t think up the chords first, but instead when the words popped into my mind they already had their melody and it took me about 30 seconds to figure out what chords went with that melody :-) And then the words instantly came out too (very little revision was required):

Woke up this morning at three AM
Thinking of the way my life has been
Wondering what happened to all of them
Those friends I had way back when.

Sat beneath the glow of an orange street light
Sheltered from the sounds of a haunted night
Thinking that I might’ve turned out all right
Still wondering how I got here tonight.

[Chorus]
And time marches on
Further into the past
Everything will soon be gone
Shoulda known it wouldn’t last.

Fell away for an hour or two
But I still ended here without you.
Remembered time, how it always flew
And all the chaos that would ensue

Oh, I remember waking ‘fore the crack of dawn
Never had to even stifle a yawn
Met with all of them out on the lawn
Raced toward trouble like we were drawn.

[Repeat chorus]
[Bridge]
These things I see will come again
In someone else’s day
When my memories grow dim
I’ll still know what to say.
[Repeat chorus]

Now don’t ask me what this necessarily means or why it came to me. That’s the funny thing about getting sudden inspiration….often you have no clue why it came out. Anyway, I wish I had some recording equipment so you could actually hear it. But maybe you’re glad you can’t :-)

The truth behind the Global Warming scam shines forth yet again!

[California] Attorney General Jerry Brown on Tuesday said he will sue to block a proposed water-bottling operation in Northern California unless its effects on global warming are evaluated.

…

Brown said the company must put its revisions into a new contract with the town of McCloud. He wants proper study of the environmental consequences of the bottling operation, saying the previous draft review had “serious deficiencies.”

He said it failed to include an examination of whether the operation will contribute to global warming through the production of plastic bottles, the operation’s electrical demands and the diesel soot and greenhouse gas emissions produced by trucks traveling to and from the plant.

“It takes massive quantities of oil to produce plastic water bottles and to ship them in diesel trucks across the United States,” Brown said in a statement. “Nestle will face swift legal challenge if it does not fully evaluate the environmental impact of diverting millions of gallons of spring water from the McCloud River into billions of plastic water bottles.”

A blind man could have seen this one coming. The Global Warming scam is just a lawyer trick. Note that once the myth of fuel emissions causing Global Warming becomes legal precedence, every company on Earth will face the same lawsuits. You want to drink a Coke? Guess what! Those are bottled elsewhere and driven by a truck to your supermarket. And then you drive to the market to buy it. (And what do you do with the plastic bottle when you’re done? You, my friend, are part of the problem too!)

But don’t worry. After you’re sued out of your house, you can’t even live in a cave in the ground–who knows what pollutants you’ll be putting into the groundwater supply? And besides, you’re a threat to the brown bears that want to sleep in the same cave.

Since getting my animation program, I think I’ve discovered I’m a latent movie director. Yeah, I already knew I could visualize things–when I write novels, I “see” them in my head as a giant movie and then just write what I see. But now that I have the ability to actually put artwork in an animation…well, let’s just say that Spielberg isn’t in any danger of losing work to me, but I think The Outlaw would be a cool movie. The only drawback is that because I’m still doing all the prep work, it’s taken me roughly six hours to do an 11 second clip containing two shots. (The good news is that I’m building virtual sets and characters, so in the future I can just drop ‘em in when I need ‘em and it won’t take nearly as long.)

Oh well. Next I’ll need to get the audio software so I can get some good sound effects and music in place….

…and I already need a vacation!

Oh well :-) Today wasn’t actually too bad. I just need to get used to waking up with the alarm again.

I only had about 500 emails to wade through. Mostly spam (and that includes spam co-workers send me–I really don’t care about the PowerPoint presentations of fields in Ireland with the pan flute music in the background, ya know).

Other than that, there’s nothing but the sounds of my precious freedom slipping away….

But at least I get paid.

Here’s a little movie I came up with today. (I tried converting it to flash, but some of the effects didn’t work, so you’re stuck with the .wmv version–it should play in all Windows Media Players, anyway.)

Proof

BTW, since I made it, permission is hereby granted for you to share it with whomever you wish to share it. Feel free to make copies and do all that fun stuff, as long as you don’t charge anyone for it. For an attribution, just put “(C) 2008 by Peter Pike.”

There appears to be some confusion over my previous post on Relativity so I want to produce some further clarification. First, we know that Einstein’s version of the train was used to destroy the concept of “simultaneity” because what is observed on the moving train as being simultaneous was not observed as being simultaneous outside the train. In reality what this demonstrated is that time itself is fluid; there is no objective time. Time, apart from frame of reference, is meaningless. Far from being a defeater to my argument (as Paul C. seems to think), this was my point.

Brian Greene gives his own example of this experiment:

Imagine that the leaders of two warring nations, sitting at opposite ends of a long negotiation table, have just concluded an agreement for a ceasefire, but neither wants to sign the accord before the other. The secretary-general of the United Nations comes up with a brilliant resolution. A light bulb, initially turned off, will be placed midway between the two presidents. When it is turned on, the light it emits will reach each of the presidents simultaneously, since they are equidistant from the bulb. Each president agrees to sign a copy of the accord when he or she sees the light. The plan is carried out and the agreement is signed to the satisfaction of both sides.

Flushed with success, the secretary-general makes use of the same approach with two other embattled nations that have also reached a peace agreement. The only difference is that the presidents involved in this negotiation are sitting at opposite ends of a table inside a train travelling along at constant velocity. Fittingly, the president of Forwardland is facing in the direction of the train’s motion while the president of Backwardland is facing in the opposite direction. Familiar with the fact that the laws of physics takes precisely the same form regardless of one’s state of motion so long as this motion is unchanging, the secretary-general takes no heed of this difference, and carries out the light bulb-initiated signing ceremony as before. Both presidents sign the agreement, and along with their entourage of advisers, celebrate the end of hostilities.

Just then, word arrives that fighting has broken out between people from each country who had been watching the signing ceremony from the platform outside the moving train. All those on the negotiation train are dismayed to hear that the reason for the renewed hostilities is the claim by people of Forwardland that they have been duped, as their president signed the agreement before the president of Backwardland. As everyone on the train—from both sides—agrees that the accord was signed simultaneously, how can it be that the outside observers watching the ceremony think otherwise?

Let’s consider in more detail the perspective of an observer on the platform. Initially the bulb on the train is dark, and then at a particular moment it illuminates, sending beams of light speeding toward both presidents. From the perspective of a person on the platform, the president of Forwardland is heading toward the emitted light while the president of Backwardland is retreating. This means, to the platform observers, that the light beam does not have to travel as far to reach the president of Forwardland, who moves toward the approaching light, as it does to reach the president of Backwardland, who moves away from it. This is not a statement about the speed of the light as it travels toward the two presidents—we have already noted that regardless of the state of motion of the source or the observer, the speed of light is always the same. Instead, we are describing only how far, from the vantage point of the platform observers, the initial flash of light must travel to reach each of the presidents. Since this distance is less for the president of Forwardland than it is for the president of Backwardland, and since the speed of light toward each is the same, the light will reach the president of Forwardland first. This is why the citizens of Forwardland claim to have been duped.

When CNN broadcasts the eyewitness account, the secretary-general, the two presidents, and all their advisers can’t believe their ears. They all agree that the light bulb was secured firmly, exactly midway between the two presidents and that therefore, without further ado, the light it emitted travelled the same distance to reach each of them. Since the speed of the emitted light to the left and right is the same, they believe, and in fact observed, that the light clearly reached each president simultaneously.

Who is right, those on or off the train? The observations of each group and their supporting explanations are impeccable. The answer is that both are right. … The only sublety here is that the respective truths seem to be contradictory. An important political issue is at stake: Did the presidents sign the agreement simultaneously? The observations and reasoning above ineluctably lead us to the conclusion that according to those on the train they did while according to those on the platform they did not. In other words, things that are simultaneous from the viewpoint of some observers will not be simultaneous from the viewpoint of others, if the two groups are in relative motion.

This is a startling conclusion. It is one of the deepest insights into the nature of reality ever discovered. Nevertheless, if long after you set down this book you remember nothing of the chapter except for the ill-fated attempt at détente, you will have retained the essence of Einstein’s discovery. Without highbrow mathematics or a convoluted chain of logic, this completely unexpected feature of time follows directly from the constancy of the speed of light, as the scenario illustrates. Notice that if the speed of light were not constant but behaved according to our intuition based on slow-moving baseballs and snowballs, the platform observers would agree with those on the train. …

The constancy of the speed of light requires that we give up the age-old notion that simultaneity is a universal concept that everyone, regardless of their state of motion, agrees upon. The universal clock previously envisioned to dispassionately tick off identical seconds here on earth and on Mars and on Jupiter and in the Andromeda galaxy and in each and every nook and cranny of the cosmos does not exist. On the contrary, observers in relative motion will not agree on which events occur at the same time. Once again, the reason that this conclusion—a bona fide characteristic of the world we inhabit—is so unfamiliar is that the effects are extremely small when the speeds involved are those commonly encountered in everyday experience. If the negotiating table were 100 feet long and the train were moving at 10 miles per hour, platform observers would “see” that the light reached the president of Forwardland about a millionth of a billionth of a second before it reached the president of Backwardland. Although this represents a genuine difference, it is so tiny that it cannot be detected directly by human senses. If the train were moving considerably faster, say at 600 million miles per hour, from the perspective of someone on the platform the light would take almost 20 times as long to reach the president of Backwardland compared with the time to reach the president of Forwardland. At high speeds, the starting effects of special relativity become increasingly pronounced.

Greene, Brian. (1999). The Elegant Universe. New York: Vintage Books. 34-37 (all italics in original)

Now we have three different examples (Einstein’s, my own, and now Greene’s), all of which really state the same thing. The sequence of events that one observes is dependent upon the relative motion between the observer and what is being observed. While Einstein and Greene both dealt strictly with concepts of simultaneity, it doesn’t take much thinking at all to change this into my own example where we have an event that occurs before another event according to one frame of reference occur after the other event in another frame of reference. In fact, in Greene’s second book (The Fabric of the Cosmos), he gave an illustration of this regarding cuts in the “space-time loaf.” Unfortunately, I’ve loaned that particular book out for the moment. But I will reproduce my own version of cutting the space-time loaf here.

In this picture, we have three events that occur separated by vast distances in space and time. For example, we could say that A is ten million light years from B, and likewise B from C (these are just arbitrary values for the sake of demonstration). We could also say that it takes 10 million years to go from “blue” to “red” to “green.” (Thus, time is going right to left.) Thus, the vertical axis of this diagram represents distance, the horizontal axis represents time.

Now from the perspective of one observer, all the “red” events at A, B, and C occur simultaneously. This observer has a “timeslice” that is directly perpendicular (in our graph). But from another perspective, the “green” event of A is simultaneous with the “red” event of B and the “blue” event of C. This “timeslice” is at a roughly 45 degree angle (both in space—that is distance—and in time—he is in the “future” if time is flowing from right to left).

Now let us give the graph some non-controversial meaning (although you must take note that the graph will not be to scale under these circumstances). Take line A as the life of a star that goes supernova (at green), line B is the life of a star that dwindles to a dwarf star (at green), and line C represents events that occur on Earth until Global Warming melts us (at green). Let’s further say that on Earth, the red dot represents the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and the blue dot represents the construction of the Great Pyramids. The red and the blue dots of the two stars are adjusted accordingly to be arbitrary events that occur at the correct time-scale.

Now obviously the observer that views perpendicularly sees that at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, both stars had the same amount of time left before reaching their ends. However, the observer at the 45 degree angle sees that the supernova star has actually gone supernova while the Great Pyramids are being built!

Now let us give it a little more controversial meaning (again, the graph is not to scale under these circumstances). Let us deal only with lines A and C. Let line A represent the bullet of a gun and let line C represent the finger that pulls the trigger. Line A is: “blue” = bullet loaded, “red” = bullet fired, “green” = bullet kills target. Line C is: “blue” = trigger finger in killer’s pocket, “red” = finger pulls trigger, “green” = finger rubbing killer’s nose. Now in this instance, the distance between line A and C is very, very short. But since a man’s finger and a bullet can never occupy the same space at the same time, there will always be some distance—even if it is only an atom’s length! As a result, the distance to the observer at the 45 degree angle (to both space AND time!) is going to be very, very far away. But the results are the same.

In one perspective, the trigger finger pulls the trigger at the instant the bullet is fired. But in the other perspective, we have the bullet being fired when the killer’s finger is in his pocket. Now the distance to this observer is probably outside the dimensions of our universe and far, far into the future from now. But that observation point does exist in theory. In theory, viewing any two events at the appropriate “timeslice” of the spacetime loaf will yield contradictions in cause and effect. Naturally, these are on such a large scale that for all practical purposes we can ignore them.

So once again, we can relate this back to what I’ve said about the logical before. Cause and effect is determined by what logically must occur before another thing can happen, NOT by what temporally occurs. Usually the logical and temporal correspond, but when it does not we have evidence that we have to adjust our frame of reference. There will be some frame of reference where that cause will temporally precede its effect, but that might not be our observational frame of reference. Our frame of reference, taken at face value, would cause us to be mistaken.

By the way, I also point out that this is the basis of the Lorentz transformation equations anyway. Those equations in essence seek to show the relationship between various frames of reference. And the point isn’t that cause and effect are destroyed at all—that’s never been what I claimed. Rather it’s the fact that cause and effect are temporally meaningless when there is no objective time; instead, they can only remain logically meaningful.

Logical precedence is not bound by frame of reference; it is the objective quality that causes must precede effects. Temporal “before” are strictly bound to frame of reference; it will always be a subjective quality. On Earth, it usually matches the objective frame of reference because the relative speed between observer and observee remains very small.

Hopefully that helps clear it up a bit.

Don’t let the title of this post fool you; I’m actually only going to say a really short thing. Given my previous post, which deals with Einstein’s Relativity, I thought it would be interesting to pass on something I once read, I believe in one of Brain Green’s books (i.e. The Fabric of the Cosmos or The Elegant Universe). However, it might have also been in Genius by James Gleick. Don’t quote me on it, but it went like this:

Relativity is counter-intuitive and doesn’t make sense at first. But it obeys the rules and once you figure them out, you can train yourself to make sense of it. Quantum Mechanics, on the other hand, is not only counter-intuitive, but you can’t train yourself to make sense of it either.

And of course I could throw in the comment usually attribuited to Niels Bohr: “If you think you’ve understood Quantum Mechanics, you haven’t understood it.” (Of course I’ve heard variations on this quote too; but this is my favorite version of it.)

Since Paul C. is having difficulty understanding why causality is linked to a logical order, not a temporal order, and since others might be interested in seeing why this is the case, I decided to write another post spelling it out clearly. Before I get into the main point, we already know that temporal order is not sufficient to infer causality because that is the post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) fallacy. A simple example will suffice: the Oklahoma City bombing happened before 9/11 happened, therefore 9/11 was caused by Timothy McVeigh. This is an obvious example of the post hoc fallacy. Others are not so obvious, and we see this many times in movies about crime. For example: The victim is killed moments before the defendant leaves the premise.

So we know that temporal order is not sufficient to infer causality. In this post, I am going to take it one step further. To do so, I must talk a bit about Einstein’s theory of Relativity. In order to follow what will occur, the most important aspect to grasp is the fact that light moves at a constant velocity regardless of the framework of the observer. This is counter-intuitive, and a simple example should show why.

Suppose you are travelling in a car that is moving at 60 miles per hour. If you throw a baseball at 60 miles an hour in the same direction that you are travelling, the ball will look (from your perspective) like it is travelling 60 miles per hour. From someone on the ground, however, the ball will look like it is travelling at 120 miles per hour. That is because the observer outside your car sees the ball’s velocity as the sum of your throw (60 miles per hour) plus your vehicles velocity (60 miles per hour).

Suppose that you saw the observer on the side of the road and wanted to throw the ball back at him after you’ve already passed. Your car is still travelling at 60 miles an hour, but you give a little extra effort and throw the ball at the observer at 70 miles per hour. The observer on the side of the road will have the ball come toward him at 10 miles per hour. (The car is moving 60 miles per hour in one direction, and you throw the ball in the opposite direction (indicated by a – sign), so the result is 60 – 70 = -10 miles per hour; or 10 miles per hour in the opposite direction that the car is moving.)

This makes sense to us because we’ve seen it in action. Suppose, however, that instead of a baseball, the person in the car turns on a flashlight. Relativity states that light will appear at approximately 3 x 10⁸ m/sec for both the observer in the vehicle and the observer outside the vehicle. That is, there is no adding on the velocity of the observer to light. It moves at a constant speed through all frames of reference.

So with this in mind, let me give a slightly different version of Einstein’s train. Suppose there are two people on opposite ends of a train and these people are named Adam and Bill. At the midpoint of the train is a bomb. Adam and Bill both have buttons they can press. This will send an electrical signal that travels at the speed of light to the bomb in the middle of the train. Adam wants to blow up the train; Bill wants to keep Adam from blowing up the train. As a result, Adam’s signal will cause the bomb to detonate while Bill’s signal will keep the bomb from detonating. Furthermore, let us stipulate that Bill is at the front of the train (i.e., toward the engine) while Adam is at the back of the train (i.e., the caboose).

For ease of math, let us stipulate that light moves at exactly 3 x 10⁸ m/s. Let us also stipulate that the distance between Bill and the bomb is exactly 1,000 meters. However, due to an error when the experiment was set up, Adam is slightly closer to the bomb: he’s only 900 meters away. Let us stipulate that from the train’s framework, Adam and Bill press their buttons at the exact same time.

Now it is obvious without even doing math that because Adam is closer to the bomb and because light travels at a constant velocity that the bomb will detonate if both press their buttons at the same time. Nevertheless, let us do the math on it.

If light travels at 300,000,000 m/s, how long does it take light to go 1,000 meters? This is a simple physics problem: t = d/v. In this case, t = 1,000 / 300,000,000 or 3.3 x 10^-6 seconds.

How long does it take light to travel 900 meters? In this case, t = 900 / 300,000,000 or 3.0 x 10^-6 seconds. This means that Adam’s signal will reach the bomb 3 x 10^-7 (0.0000003) seconds before Bill’s signal will reach the bomb.

Now suppose that there is an outside observer named Charlie. The train is moving. But because light has a constant velocity irrespective of the observer, he will see both signals travel at 3 x 10⁸ m/s just like those inside the train. Suppose that at the exact instant (from Charlie’s perspective) the bomb is in front of him, both Adam and Bill press their buttons, what does Charlie see? He sees two signals travelling at 3 x 10⁸ m/s. But he also sees the bomb travelling toward Bill’s position (Bill is at the engine) and away from Adam’s (Adam is in the caboose).

This means from Charlie’s perspective, if Adam and Bill were exactly the same distance apart and pressed their buttons at exactly the same instant, the signal from Bill’s button would reach the bomb before the signal from Adam’s button would reach the bomb. But because we know that Adam is 100 meters closer to the bomb than Bill, we ask a question: how fast must the train be moving so that from Charlie’s perspective both signals will reach the bomb at the same time?

As we calculated above, Bill’s signal will reach the bomb 3 x 10^-7 seconds after Adam’s. And we know that the difference in distance is 100 meters. So we need the train to cover 100 meters in 3 x 10^-7 seconds. However, this distance is split between Adam and Bill. That is, because the signal is moving toward Bill and away from Adam, the train needs to actually only cover 50 meters in 3 x 10^-7 seconds. This gives us 50m /0.0000003s = 1.67 x 10⁸ m/s, or just over 50% the speed of light.

So let us suppose that the train is moving at 2 x 10⁸ m/s, or 2/3s the speed of light. What will Charlie see?

He sees Adam press his button. The signal moves out at 3 x 10⁸ m/s and covers 900 meters. However, when it hits the 900 meter mark (from Charlie’s perspective) 3.0 x 10^-6 seconds later, the bomb has moved. The bomb is moving at 2 x 10⁸ m/s, and it does so for the same 3.0 x 10^-6 seconds. That means the bomb has moved 600 meters further down the track after that 3.0 x 10 ^-6 seconds. Ultimately, this means it takes Adam’s signal 9.0 x 10^-6 seconds to actually read the bomb.

At the same instant, Charlie sees Bill press the button. Bill’s signal travels out at 3 x 10⁸ m/s and the bomb has moved toward him at 2 x 10⁸ m/s too. This means that it takes only 2.0 x 10^-6 for Bill’s signal to reach the bomb. From Charlie’s perspective, Bill’s signal reaches the bomb 7.0 x 10^-6 seconds before Adam’s does.

What will the train do? Answer: it will explode. Even from Charlie’s perspective, it will still explode. Why is that? Because on the train, which is where the bomb is located, Adam’s signal reaches the bomb 3 x 10^-7 seconds before Bill’s signal does. Charlie observes Bill’s signal arriving 7.0 x 10^-6 seconds before Adam’s does, however. From Charlie’s perspective, the signal that causes the bomb to explode arrives after the signal to keep the bomb from exploding should have neutralized it.

So what caused the train to explode? Adam’s signal did. But from Charlie’s perspective, it shouldn’t have. But Charlie is still left with an exploding train, one that does not fit in a temporal causative sense. It does, however, fit logically. He knows that logically Adam’s signal must have caused the train to explode, and that Bill’s counter-signal did not neutralize the bomb.

Naturally, the train had to be going extremely fast: 2/3 the speed of light. Since we never reach those speeds on Earth, cause and effect usually follow the temporal scheme. However, it is a fallacy for us to believe that causes are temporal causes for the reasons illustrated above. The only thing that matters is whether logically they are causes. If we know that A and only A logically causes B, then even if we observe B occurring before A we know that A is the cause of B. This must be the case.

This is also why we can have logical precedence (that is, a logical before) without having a temporal before. This is commonly seen in theology when, for instance, we talk about the decrees of God. The difference between Infralapsarians and Supralapsarians boils down to the logical order of the decrees of God, not the temporal order (since all agree that temporally each decree occurred before the foundation of the world, in eternity past; that is, outside of time). There is no temporal before in causality; there is only a logical before.

Today is payday for me. I celebrated the fact that my supervisor filled out and turned in my timesheet for me so that I actually got a pay check despite being on vacation by buying myself breakfast at the local Denny’s and then going to see The Dark Knight again. There was only one glitch in my idea. I finished breakfast at around 7:45 (BTW, what was I doing up at 7:45 anyway when I’m on freaking VACATION?!?! I don’t know either.) The first movie didn’t show until 10. And it was only a ten minute walk from Denny’s to the theater.

Thankfully, I brought along a book to read (It by Stephen King, which was one of the first King books I read and which I recall hating when I first read it, although this time through it’s not so bad–then again, it was the ending I thought really sucked and I’m only on page 300 now). And also thankfully between the Denny’s and the theater there’s a pond with a gigantic fountain in the middle of it. This pond is connected to several different waterways, so I stopped on a bridge over one of them and read It while also watching the ducks paddle in the pond.

There was one duckling in the pond and about seven adults. All the adults except the mother would peck at the duckling whenever it swam near to them, so it stuck pretty much by the side of his mother. Now over by the side of the pond there were several rocks, and after a while the other ducks left and Mama Duck jumped up on one of the rocks and began to sun herself.

The only problem was the rock was too high for the duckling to jump up. So he climbed up a different rock.

Now the rock Mama was on was a nice, flat rock, shaped like a mesa. The rock Duckling climbed was…well, a three-sided pyramid. And each time he got up near the top, he would shake the water from his feathers, immediately do a summersault and roll right back into the pond. He did this about six times in a row while I watched.

Now obviously ducks aren’t the brightest creatures in the world. Still, this would have been a cool thing to put into Public Transit to help with the Hampster Wheel of Life metaphor I had going…

Oh well. C’est la vie. Maybe in the sequel… (no, there won’t be a sequel).

Since Travis knows what I’m referring to, he’ll probably be the only one to get this post. At least for some time :-P

So, Travis-dude! Apocalypsis is now roughly 40% done. :-)

BTW, I also found my copy of 1984 so I’ll try to bring it to work next week for you.

Everyone else can now return to their regularly schedule blogfest.