ethan[at]malasky[dot]net

Holy Cow

I heard Temple Grandin on Fresh Air (Hi, Terry!) a while ago and was amazed by her strength and pure brilliance. She's the autistic woman who changed the livestock industry through her understanding of animals. Plus, she's an eloquent voice into the experience of autism.

Here's an amazingly great video of her. (Of course, kisses to Boing Boing)

Rant at a nameless DMV lady

Went to the DMV today to transfer the title of the car I just bought. Made an appointment on my website, showed up on time, filled out the form and got my tag, A019.

I sat and waited while numbers were called and the number/window mappings were update on the easily-readable monitors.

I was there ten minutes before my number was called and I transacted my bureaucratic business. A great experience.

But while I was waiting, a woman with a blue C-SPAN tote bag started complaining. "My appointment was fifteen minutes ago. I've been waiting fifteen minutes!" As the clerks shuttled her around to multiple uncaring windows, she muttered to anyone who cared "you shouldn't have to wait fifteen minutes for an appointment...."

It's the frickin' DMV, lady! Have you ever been here before? Or even heard of the DMV's reputation? Have you ever been to the doctor, or a fancy restaurant? Or an airport? Things don't always happen exactly on time.

Things especially don't always happen on time at goverment agencies. Maybe you should try watching your beloved C-SPAN sometime.

Douglas Adams on Existence.

I just read this amazing piece, a speech Douglas Adams gave in 1998. He somehow manages to discuss and interconnect religion, evolution, technology, quantum mechanics, feng shui and sand.

There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be, but we have done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions.

It's a long read, but entirely fun. I think his thread about how simple pieces can combine into ridiculous complexity can be extended to challenge our notions of life itself. He starts out with this point: it's hard to define the boundary between living and non-living. But he stops short of tying that to artificial life.

Quantum mechanics has claims to be predicated on the notion that the Universe behaves as if there was a multiplicity of universes, but it rather strains our credulity to think that there actually would be.

This goes straight back to Gallileo and the Vatican. In fact, what the Vatican said to Gallileo was, “We don't dispute your readings, we just dispute the explanation you put on them. It's all very well for you to say that the planets sort of do that as they go round and it is as if we were a planet and those planets were all going round the sun; it's alright to say it's as if that were happening, but you're not allowed to say that's what is happening, because we have a total lockhold on universal truth and also it simply strains our personal credulity”. Just so, I think that the idea that there are multiple universes currently strains our credulity but it may well be that it's simply one more strain that we have to learn to live with, just as we've had to learn to live with a whole bunch of them in the past.

(Thanks to Metagrrl)