Tripp's Trip

Still waiting . . .

2010-06-02T00:17:00.000-05:00

My divorce may or may not be final on 6/3, but that is the date I am holding to. What is the sticking point? We will not have a court hearing. Because of mediation, we will simply have to file the paperwork with the court. So what is the holdout? Even though the agreement was reached, jointly, through mediation, my soon-to-be-ex insists that she must get the okay from her attorney. Sigh. I suppose this is okay, but my soon-to-be-ex was the one in such a hurry to get me out of the house.

As expected, I have mixed feelings. It will be nice to get out from underneath some big bills. It will be nice to have a lot more freedom, I can't argue with that.

So what is the problem? It is very hard to break the old bonds. I had the role of caretaker with my OCPD soon to be ex for a long time, and I suppose I got some fulfillment from that. It is hard to stop that role, even when it is initiated by my wife.

The next time I post it should be from my new apartment. Wish me luck.

Divorce nearly final- mea culpa

2010-05-06T11:39:00.000-05:00

Dear readers,

My divorce is nearly final. We have finished mediation and have an agreed-to settlement that my attorney is writing up for a tentative filing date of 6/3 of this year.

This has been a heart-wrenching process for me. I have found that whenever I got stuck it was because I had some unresolved issues that I needed to deal with and resolve before moving on. The human brain is a remarkable and surprising thing, and in every case I found that while I initially had no clue what my sticking point was, in every case, after sometimes great anguish, I finally had a breakthrough 'aha' moment where the problem was remarkably obvious, and yet I had been totally blind to it.

My personal sticking points were when I had to fully realize and acknowledge the bad things that I have done to bring our marriage to this point. My conscience would not let me move on until I recognized what I had done, acknowledged it, and then apoligized and made amends.

This freed up my spouse so that she could do the same.

I had to come clean to make a clean break.

It is possible that had I come to this realization years ago, we would have never come to this place. I dunno. I know I tried to resolve things then, and could not do it, which is when I turned to drugs to numb my emotions. In hindsight I think that my only other option at that time was to get a divorce then. We had young children. What was the better choice, to divorce then, or to use a bad, temporary method such as drugs to let me 'get by' but also to kick the problem down the road, where it still had to be addressed, and where drugs simply complicated things further.

I have no answer to this question. It does not really matter now. I did what I did and I admit that, I take responsibility for that, and I admit that my choice was hurtful to my wife and to her family. I have apologized to them, sincerely, and now I am moving on.

I'll be getting an apartment, because that is the best solution for this time. It is temporary, and it does not tie me down. As you may know I am now building a new relationship with a wonderful woman, and I need the freedom to follow that where it goes.

Sorry that I have not made frequent posts here. I was doing important work elsewhere - getting my head straight and getting my affairs settled so that I can move on.

Until next time,

Tripp

At the precipice

2010-04-08T23:08:00.000-05:00

Well, dear readers, it has been awhile, and a few things have progressed. I find myself at the precipice, waiting to find out what my soon-to-be-ex (STBE) wants to take from me in order to get satisfaction.

My wife will not speak directly to me about this, so we will meet with a moderator and my wife will again bring along her brother. Yup. Two against one. Unusual, so the moderator says, but okay as long as everyone agrees to it.

This is our third session. The first two sessions were fairly benign, mostly fact gathering, but even so my STBE had to leave the room because it was too tense for her. She could not stand to hear me say that I felt ownership of the house because I had put work into it. In all fairness it is she who has put the majority of the work into the house, and I have put the majority of the money into it, but even so - she has contributed some money and I have contributed some work.

I have no idea how she will take it when I say that I wish to retain the house. In essence I wish to buy her out - using some of my pension and most of my 401K to do it.

Why am I wanting this? It comes down to my youngest daughter, who is 13. I need to retain the house so that she may have stability and so that I will have 50% physical custody. I want custody to be 50/50. I have a very good relationship with my daughter, and my daughter wishes to have custody as 50/50, so I think that is that.

If my STBE fights me on this I have a two step response. The first is to list the things I have just stated. In addition, I am the one with good friends in the neighborhood, and I do not have a feud with a neighbor, and I do not have a job at the moment so I would likely not get a mortgage at this time, and my STBE dislikes much of the work that a large house entails, and my STBE is the one who wishes to leave the marriage.

If that does not work then I go on to step two, the big stuff. My STBE and brother have said that they will NOT use their money to bully me, and I will hold them to that. In addition, I know that my STBE forged my signature last year, and I highly suspect there has been some shady tax stuff going on in their family, and I would go public with that information if I needed to. My in-laws have the core value of 'protecting the money' and the deeper core value of 'protecting the family name' so any hint of accusations would be painful to them. I have already given interviews to the press about my layoff from IBM, and the press, here and in my in-law's small town, are looking for a followup. I would like to tell the press that in these troubling times my in-laws have stuck with me and supported me through this rough patch. I would like to say that. But if I must tell the truth I will state that when the chips were down my in-laws abandoned me when I needed them most. My wife kept hidden funds from me, and is withholding them from the marital assets. My in-law's family business, that wants to have such a wonderful reputation, is run by people who put money before family.

I do not wish to air dirty laundry, but if they back me into a corner I will use everything I have to get a fair deal. If you fuck with the bull you get the horns.

I sincerely hope that I do not have to do this. My father-in-law was the sweetest guy you could ever meet, and his only flaw was that he got beholden to a shrew of a wife who threatened to remove her family money and ruin him if he divorced her. Because of that family money my Father-in-law was able to buy a second bank, but he paid a dear price for that bank, a very dear price. He spent his whole life trying to make his wife happy, and this woman could never be happy. I am convinced she suffers from the same malady that my wife has, OCPD. Check it out, it is listed in the DSM IV manual.

My mother-in-law's inherited wealth caused her to reject her brother so hurtfully that they never reconciled for the rest of his life. It also allowed my mother-in-law to rule a household and become a grotesque caricature of a human woman. Physically she is so enormous from the waist down she is unable to walk without a walker. Her upper torso is fairly normal, but her hair is dyed clown orange in some hopeless attempt to recreate the natural color it may have had when she was young.

Physical attributes aside, her brain is out of whack. She has never worked a day in her life, and she would be unable to do much if she had to. She cannot understand how to use a microwave oven and she refuses to cook. She had a lovely singing voice but that was it. She was normally frustrated and angry most of the time, and the small town doctor gave her tranquilizers which did not settle her down, but which allowed her to go on frantic tirades, hitting her husband and children, yelling horrible things at them, and having no recollection later of any of that happening. Barbiturates will do that to a person.

My wife tells terrible tales of hiding from her mother with a friend in a closet, or getting dropped off at a gymnastics meet and being told by her mother "I hope you fail!" Her mother frequently demanded that her husband, the President of two banks, come home and explain things to her.

Yup. This was no peaceful household, and now that my Father-in-law has passed away it seems the tyrant is running the show. And my wife has morphed into her Mother. Shudder.

So that is the pickle old Tripp has gotten himself into. I have my brains, a little money, some information, and that is about it. I am facing a red-headed OCPD millionaire Irish woman along with her short, stout, wimpy brother, backed by their elderly, tyrannical, multimillionaire mother.

Wish me luck, dear readers, wish me luck.

Joseph Stack and the limits of Heinleinism

2010-02-19T12:05:00.001-06:00

Yesterday morning Joseph A. Stack flew his small plane into an IRS building near Austin, Texas, killing himself and at least one other person, wounding many people, and causing massive property damage.

This caught my attention because of the obvious similarities to 9/11, but soon after some other similarities came to my attention and totally hooked me.

The guy was my age, 53, and he was a software engineer, like me. He had written a manifesto, like Ted Kazinski did, and although the FBI took it off the internet as soon as they found it, the archive copy was already made, and you can find it at the Smoking Gun.

You really should read it, although I figure few people will bother. Still, I plan to copy it into another blog post here, to retain a copy.

The obvious question yesterday, once they figured out who "did it," was "why'd he do it?"

The soundbite answers started to dribble in, and they pissed me off, because they were obviously supplied by law enforcement and they were designed to slant the coverage from the start. I wanted an in-depth answer, and I know that that takes time to discover, but I did not like it that they were shutting off primary sources such as the manifesto. I did not see that as necessary.

I know that I am probably starting to sound like a trouble-maker, perhaps someone who is himself going off the deep end, like Joseph Stack, and I understand that concern. Please bear with me and you will see how I have some similarities to Joseph, but I also have some key differences too.

Also, before I begin, I should say that recently I have been re-reading some of Heinlien, and I am amazed to discover just how much his writings influenced me during my formative years. I think some of this is pertinent in the Joseph Stack case as well.

One key protagonist Heinlein came back to again and again was the everyman who was completely competent, in control, and more or less a rugged individualist with a moral code based on chivalry. This is an extremely attractive character for young men to emulate, especially intelligent men with a scientific or engineering bent, and I think it accounts for much of the popularity of modern libertarianism amongst those men today.

I think Joseph Stack, like me, drank that koolaid long and deep. I can empathize with that part of him. Part of that appeal of that persona is the assumption that we live in a meritocracy, and people like that will be rewarded for their work ethic, ingenuity, and good character. I also used to believe this, down to the core of my being.

Unlike me, who after college entered the safe and warm and sticky and boring embrace of a large multinational corporation, Joseph Stack struck out on his own, forming a one-man corporation in computer consulting. I am sure this suited his character very well, and I am sure he was good at it, but I am equally sure that he found out very quickly that the business world is not a fair jousting competition, that people are out to screw you, that the large corporations are out to exploit you and take everything you have and give as little as possible in return, and that nobody really give a scatological reference about you and about what happens to you.

This is tough stuff, but Joseph Stack faced it head on, and he redoubled his efforts. I think this is a BIG difference between myself and Joseph Stack, and I think this shows a BIG potential problem in being a 'Heinlein hero.' While perseverance is a good trait in general, like every trait, it has a down side. At some point, if one is attempting an impossible task, one needs to acknowledge that, learn from it, let it go, and walk away.

Joseph Stack did not do that. He refused to give up on his dream. Along the way, it seems he did have many nice things - he played bass in a band or bands with some great pals, and he learned to pilot his own small plane.

At the same time, he had tax problems, some of which were created by the multinational corporations to keep guys like him down. This hurt him, badly. Over the years he struggled with that, and it seems that this Spring the tax problems once again sprang up for him in a big way, and enough was enough.

In addition to his personal problems Joseph Stack started looking around and he found out that much of what he had been told when he was growing up was a lie. Specifically, we are NOT living in a meritocracy, we do NOT have a representative government in any meaningful sense of the word, and we ARE not, as a society, rising up, we are falling down. I think Joseph Stack was finally confronting the fact that in a sense he had been living in a fantasy world, and his 'ideal man,' the 'Heinlein hero' does NOT get rewarded in the real world. Our power structure is designed to keep those with power on top, and power corrupts, so we are destined to face corrupt people with power over us, and we are powerless to change that.

There are plenty of examples of that with us today, and I believe the FBI counted that Joseph lashed out at either 27 or 37 examples. The FBI is using that fact to claim that Joseph was a loony who hated everything, but that is not the case. The truth is that we have numerous examples, today, of the injustice and unfairness that is perpetrated by our society, where those on top reap the rewards and can do no wrong, and the rest of us pay the price and can do no right.

Since I agree and have empathy with so much of what Joseph Stack did, how, then, am I different from him, and why do I know that I will not 'snap.'

For one thing, I do not think I am a 'wound collector,' which is how the profiler characterized Joseph. I have had my share of wounds, sure, but to a good degree I think I have learned from them, and I am moving on. I think I am able to do this because, unlike Joseph, I faced my disillusionment with individualism and our modern society awhile ago, and I gave up fighting the impossible fight. I still try to be a 'Heinlein hero,' but now I do it because for me it is 'right,' and not because I expect any external rewards. Also, I am stepping off the money treadmill, and I am seeking my personal fulfillment in living a good life conforming to my moral code, and in some of the simpler and more fulfilling pleasures that life has to offer - the enjoyment of beauty, in nature and in people, the enjoyment of fellowship with like-minded people, and the deep fulfillment that comes from helping others. I think Heinlein would totally agree with my choices. The world I face is different from the world he faced.

But I suspect that there will be more cases like Joseph Stack coming up, and I suspect there is nothing we can do to stop them. At this point nobody other than, perhaps, the ultra-rich, can change our future, and I see no hope for action from the ultra-rich. If those in power do not change things then, eventually, they will be changed by external forces. Perhaps enough people will opt out of the existing system. Perhaps as the power moves elsewhere so will the problems. Perhaps we face revolution. Who knows?

Who knows?

Changes changes changes

2010-01-21T12:06:00.000-06:00

Wow, when things change, they CHANGE!

I have started a new job - yay!! Yes, it is actually very nice. It has also pushed me way out of my comfort zone, and lemme tell you, when you are used to knowing something like the back of your hand it is a shock to go back into newbie mode. The people explaining things FLY through them, and it is all I can do to keep up and hold on. It is tough to say "What is that?" and "just a sec," because it is scary to think "I don't know *anything* and I am worthless!"

Yeah, the old ego thing, and I need to swallow that and suck it up and be patient and learn and know this phase does not last forever, but I gotta tell ya, you know that movie about the guy who went through life being an imposter and a fraud, pretending to be a pilot and a Doctor and who knows what else? When I am like this, learning a new job, I feel like an imposter. I know, I know, the difference is that I am honest and I am not trying to fool anyone, my employers know that I need to learn things, but how many things? If you are not fresh out of college it is understood that you should know something, right?

I suppose this will help me learn humility and empathy for other people learning things. Yeah, but I don't like the feeling, which I suppose gives me the energy to learn and try to become competent once again. And the truth is that in the computer biz there was no 'standing still' for very long anyway. Just about when I'd get comfortable with something I'd have to move on, which I guess also suits me, because I do get bored with things once I know them.

So, yeah, this post is a whine whine whine! Poor me, boo hoo. (grin)

The traffic around Minneapolis I am not happy with, and I hear it is not nearly as bad here as it is in other locations. Anyway you cut it the traffic is a pain, but what can one do?

On the personal front, my soon to be ex, who served me with divorce papers on 12/23 last year, has now backed into her normal, passive, wait and see mode. Geeze. We are supposed to be working out the details, but she is waiting for someone to tell her what to do. Sigh. So I can see that progress on this will be up to me.

Now that I have become the 'perfect' spouse for her, she is backing off, and almost being nice at times. By 'perfect' I mean rarely around but sending the money. I am out of the house for almost a week this time, staying in an in-expensive hotel closer to my work. So, you may ask, why don't I see about reconciling with my soon to be ex?

Two reasons. The biggest one is this - I have found someone who I love and who seems to like me the way I am, warts and all, and when you've faced constant dissatisfaction for years and years this feels wonderful - very wonderful.

The second reason is because this past year I saw, completely, that my soon to be ex could not STAND me in person, and let's face it, at some point I want to stop being an absentee spouse and actually spend time with my wife. I WANT a close, loving relationship with my spouse, and that is not possible with my soon to be ex.

So I am doing the leg work, gathering all our financial info, and will create two or three proposals. I know my wife will be critical of them, and will NOT be able to choose one. She simply cannot make a decision. This is one big reason why she never has time to do what she wants - she takes hours while shopping waffling and second guessing.

But what can I do? I will make the proposals, and I will keep the pressure on, and I will keep this ball rolling forward, because my life has been in limbo for SO long and I am tired of it, especially now that I SEE where I want to be.

I want to be with my new love. Am I in a honeymoon period? Maybe, to some degree, but we are taking things slow, and there is no sense skipping the honeymoon period. Instead, we both are enjoying it, and doing the hard work of disentangling ourselves from our spouses.

And what about the morality of this? Our religion says it is okay. We both have tried, really tried, to re-connect with our spouses after the child-rearing phase completed. What else can we do? We both want to get out and discover the world, and both our spouses want to retreat and cocoon.

I have actually wondered if our spouses would be right for each other. They have a great deal in common. They both are sickly, they both LOVE endless shows full of graphic rape and violence and sending the perps to jail, and they both view the world with tired, crabby eyes. They both seem to be done with physical affection.

Is this enough to build a relationship on? Who knows? It would not be the kind of relationship I want, that is for sure.

2009 - the year that was.

2010-01-04T11:34:00.004-06:00

Time for my annual New Year's post. Well, my very first annual New Year's post, but every tradition starts some time, right?

The year 2009 began, for me, with great personal turmoil and pessimism. I had concluded a year with not enough real work to be done, and thus too much free time to study the world of politics, economics, and energy. I think most people agree that 2008 was grim - the Wall Street meltdown, the energy crisis abated only by economic malaise, and the conclusion of eight years of awful Bush presidency.

In addition, my personal job, at IBM, was tenuous at best, because IBM was shedding US workers as fast as it could. And then, on top of all that, my Father-in-law, the patriarch of my wife's family, the one nice guy that held her contentious family together, had succumbed to Lewy Body Dementia, and he was dying.

In early January 2009 my father-in-law died. In late January 2009 I was informed of my layoff from IBM. My old life was decomposing before my eyes.

Financially I was okay, really, but personally I had zero resources. My parents were sickly and crabby, and in addition to my alcoholic brother, who they had taken in years before, and who was still drinking, they were forced to take in my sister, who suffers badly from depression. Thus my parents were already caring for two of their three adult children.

My children, at least the eldest three, were engrossed in their own struggles with high school and college. My wife turned against me. Completely against me. I am not sure how that came about, but I suspect it had something to do with her insecurities and losing her Father, and then having me let her down by losing my job, so despite years of my wife appreciating my independent nature, she now saw it as ingratitude towards her deceased Father, claiming that I had NEVER appreciated anything her family had given me. I tried to explain that I greatly appreciated what her Father had given me, but I was uncomfortable with large gifts because I did not want to be dependent on him. I tried to explain that I identified with him, because he was a giver and so was I and yet while he was alive he pretty much suffered stoically and not until his death did he get the appreciation that he deserved. I tried to explain that I saw the same fate for myself, and unlike her father, I did not want that for myself. I attempted to stand up for myself and ask for some recognition, and this was seen as jealousy and this was seen as a terrible thing, a betrayal of sorts, a criticism of my wife's family.

My wife abandoned me and returned to the security of her family's fortune. My independence was now seen as ingratitude, my intelligence was now seen as arrogance, and my 30+ years of steady, prosperous work was now seen as a failure because it did not extend for another fifteen years like it was supposed to.

At that time the only person who treated me with the smallest amount of giving, and not taking, was my twelve year old daughter, who seemed to like having her Dad around.

I would visit my parents and they would chastise me because they did not like me when I was unhappy. They missed the happy Tripp. My wife soon hated seeing me idle at any time, and she wanted me out of the house, away from her, but earning money to give to her. My eldest children did not want to get involved.

All this, I suppose, comes partly from my own doing. I had built a relationship structure around the idea that I was a rock, a giver, someone everyone could depend on, and so nobody in my personal group was ready to support me when I needed it most. I had tried to emulate my wife's father, but without the security of inherited wealth and the banks that went with it I was not the master of my own fate. My employer cast me out. I was also not of the Catholic faith, so I was not willing to suffer in silence as my father-in-law had done, doing everything that is humanly possible to attempt to somehow satisfy his never-happy wife, his wife who had inherited *her* wealth and who had never worked a day in her life and who was still not happy.

My wife wanted me to take a pill, or talk to a counselor, but to ask nothing of her, and to instead straighten myself out so I could give more to her, to continue, as her father did with his wife, to try to satisfy her and to try to make her happy.

I did see a counselor, a marriage counselor, and he advised me to open communications with my wife, to ask my wife for what I needed, to try to create a mutually helpful relationship between us, but when my wife came to counseling we never got around to that subject. We spent the entire time listening to all the ways that I had failed my wife, and all the problems that she had had with me, and how awful it was for my wife to see me idle, loafing around, while she had to work her sixteen-hour-a-week job.

I continued on with counseling, alone, for as long as it took for me to see that my wife would never change. Whether it was due to genetics or learned behavior, my wife expected me to treat her the very same way her father had treated her mother, even though I had none of the resources her father had, and even though she had none of the resources her mother had.

Once I clearly saw that I began dismantling as much of my life as I could, and I stopped trying to make my wife happy. I started thinking about what I wanted, and I started planning for how I could get it. My wife served me with divorce papers on 12/23, but I had seen that coming. I think my wife was trying to force me back to work, to force me to continue supplying her with money. The funny thing is that I actually DO want to get back to work, and finally, after a very bad year of hundreds of job applications, I have gotten a firm job contract on the same day my wife said "Ha! I beat you to it!!" and told me to expect divorce papers.

Now I am trying to build my life over, and this time I am looking for people that might give as well as take. Someday my kids will come around. They need to grow up more first, and when they become more secure they will be grateful for what they have gotten.

I have gotten very sensitive to what I call 'toxic' people now. I can smell them a mile away, and I run like the wind when I get a whiff. I am talking about sour, bitter, critical and judgmental people. People like my soon to be ex-wife.

Life is hard enough without having to listen to judgmentalism and judgments and criticism. Carping about someone else is one of the easiest things to do, and it is toxic, especially when the someone else is already feeling down. At times like that a kind word, a caring heart, a bit of encouragement and recognition matter a great deal.

My goal, in 2010, is to seek out more of the giving people, more of the gentle people, more of the caring people, and to join them, and contribute what I can, because heaven knows my soul is weary and in need of great restoration.

Peace to all.

Questions that need to be answered

2009-12-22T21:21:00.000-06:00

If one knows that one's family has been shattered - say by the serving of divorce papers from one spouse to the other, which is the better thing to do? Sleepwalk through the old holiday rituals, pretending that things are just as they always were, or refrain, knowing that things will never be that way again?

One other question - why are the presents that I paid for, and no one else paid for, still welcome at the Christmas celebration when I am not welcome there. Does money really mean that much?

And if I paid for the present, and I am not allowed to attend the party, then why does the tag still say it is from "Both of us?"

Am I petty for noticing that while my money apparently means nothing, your money and time are precious and should be appreciated and praised by all?

Sorry to interrupt the high-larious tale but

2009-12-15T20:35:00.002-06:00

Dear Readers,

Sorry for the lapse in my tale. I think you will understand in a moment why the story-telling went on hiatus.

Turns out that Mrs. Tripp very much did not like my layoff from IBM. Mrs. Tripp especially did NOT like my boondoggle to Switzerland.

Mrs. Tripp let her feelings be known by, today, having me served with divorce papers. And, I sh*t you not, this very same day I got a formal job offer for a great job at nearly my previous pay.

Yeah. I believe the term "whipsawed" applies here. And only nine more shopping days before Christmas. Wow.

I guess I am fortunate to discover the soon-to-be-ex Mrs. Tripp's true feelings before the money starts coming in again. Some things you just can't take back, and I think Divorce papers are one of those things.

Tripp goes to a backyard barbecue

2009-12-10T14:46:00.000-06:00

Anyone joining the party here should go back here and read the story from the start. I really wish the blog tool allowed one to write things from the top down.

As you recall, dear Readers, when last we left Tripp he had recently had his port testicle novocained, and he was anticipating the excitement and fun that would ensue once the female Dr. Gray really got the party started. Let us resume the story at that point . . .

Phantom baseball played with a tennis ball

2009-12-09T00:11:00.012-06:00

Anyone joining the party here should go back here and read the story from the start. I really wish the blog tool allowed one to write things from the top down.

As you recall, dear Readers, when last we left Tripp he had recently had his jewels shaved, in icy water, but he was recovering nicely under the warmth of a heat lamp. Let us resume the story at that point . . .

I basked in the warmth of the heat lamp, enjoying my relief and enjoying my satisfaction. I felt the relief that one feels when one has had an ordeal, and when the ordeal is over, and I felt the satisfaction that comes from knowing that one has successfully "bit the bullet," that one has "manned up," and that one has "thought of England" (TY, Debbie!), and one has come out the other side.

While I was basking, Dr. Gray, the female Dr. Gray, came into the room, and she sat down and she began examining my now-warm sctrotum. I thought "Now this is more like it," and I was relaxed, but the thing is that I should not have been relaxed. I should not have been feeling good.

Do you recall, back in the previous chapter, how I was thinking about words like "procedure" and "just" and "feminism" whilst being shaved? Do you know what I *should* have been thinking? Hmmmm? Well I know what I should have been thinking. Yes, yes, hindsight is 50/50, we all know that, but still, I really should have been thinking this: "Why is the bastard Barry shaving my balls?!"

You see, the mind is a tricky thing. The mind sees what the mind wants to see, similar to how the heart loves what the heart loves. And with all of my knowledge, with all of my wisdom, and with all of my years of study, my mind had willfully ignored one unpleasant fact. Every time I had seen the illustrations of a vasectomy in a newspaper article, no doubt planted there by some feminist, I saw the blow-up illustration of the vas deferens being looped and snipped like a piece of string and I assumed, yes, I ASSUMED, that the loop in question was taken from an incision somewhere in the lower abdomen.

I had heard talk about a pulling sensation, and I had assumed that they meant a little tug as the vas deferens was pulled out of an incision somewhere near, well, somewhere near the lower abdomen. My mind had fooled itself, and for all of those years I had been willfully ignorant of the fact that a vasectomy meant that someone would be cutting away at my balls!!

Willful ignorance can be a very useful thing. It allowed us to invade Iraq, for example. It allows us to ignore certain unpleasantries that we wish to ignore. But the problem with willful ignorance is that, at some time, our ignorance may bump into reality, and reality always wins. Bless you, reality. Bless you for giving us a reference point.

But let us snap back to the Procedure room, where the female Dr. Gray was examining my scrotum . . .

As the female Dr. Gray was examining my scrotum, stretching it this way and that, feeling the structures that were hidden inside of it, It occurred to me that the female Dr. Gray had more than a passing interest in what she was stretching. I cleared my throat and asked her what she was looking for. "The best place for the incisions," she replied.

I froze. Willful ignorance or no willful ignorance, my mind realized the awful reality that the female Dr. Gray was going to cut my ball! Actually, scratch that idea, the female Dr. Gray was going to cut BOTH of my balls! That was why the Bastard Barry shaved my balls, and that was why my legs were shackled to the chair!

"Incisions?" I asked, and the female Dr. Gray must have heard the fear in my voice, because she looked up, and then she looked down again, and then she picked up a syringe attached to a needle, and then she said "Oh don't worry. There will be just a couple of cuts, but first I will numb the area with this novocaine."

Now I am a big fan of novocaine. Actually I am a VERY big fan of novocaine, provocaine, benzocaine, and any other members of the large caine family. When I visit the dentist I ask for two shots of novocaine, just to make sure I get full coverage. "No sense feeling any pain," that is what I always say. So I breathed a sigh of relief when the female Dr. Gray placed the needle over injection site number one. I averted my eyes, because I prefer not to see my skin being pierced, and then ZOWEEE, flashback number three.

When I was a tween, I had two great friends named Eugene and Dale. The three of us would play just about every sport together, and we would vary the sport based on the season of the year. Summertime, of course, was baseball time. We would play long games, every day, in the field behind my house.

Those of you familiar with the sport of baseball know that it is normally played with nine players on each team, so trying to play a game of baseball with only three players was a difficult thing to do. Our way around that limitation was our invention of "Phantom" baseball. In Phantom baseball there were two players on defense, the pitcher and the catcher, and there was one player on offense, the batter. We played a variation called "Pitcher's hand out," meaning that when the batter hit the ball he had to run to first base, but if the pitcher got the ball before the batter reached first base it was as if the first baseman had gotten the ball, and the batter would be out.

If the batter made it successfully to first base then there would be a phantom runner on first base, and the batter would go back to bat again, now with a phantom runner on first base. In Phantom baseball every hit was a single, and it was impossible to get a double, triple, or home-run. We would play this game for hours, rotating between pitcher, catcher, and batter, with each of us keeping our own personal scores.

The other local variation we used was that instead of a regular baseball we used a tennis ball. The tennis ball allowed us to pitch from a position closer to the batter, and it also ensured that the batter or catcher would not be hurt if they were hit by either a pitched ball or by a foul ball.

My flashback took me into a game of phantom baseball, on a hot afternoon in August. I was pitching, Eugene was batting, and Dale was catching. In general Eugene was the second best hitter, behind me, but I could usually strike him out by throwing very fast fast balls. This particular time I threw the ball very fast towards Eugene, and I remember that I saw him swing the bat, and I saw nothing else before THWHACK! Eugene had hit a screaming line drive back at me, so fast that I could not get my glove in front of it, and that blazing tennis ball hit me right in the Funniest Home Videos Ten Thousand dollar winning location. THWHACK went the ball, and down went me. I instinctively curled up into a fetal position, and the pain around my groin was incredibly intense, and it picked up intensity the closer it got to my groin, so that at ground zero the pain was so strong it transcended pain, and instead it approached the Wrath of God in its intensity.

The ball rolled around my feet, but it didn't matter, because both Eugene and Dale were laughing so hard that they fell down and they had to hold their stomachs. I was holding a different area.

Back in the procedure room, as the female Dr. Gray pushed the plunger, a tiny part of my mind, a very tiny part of my mind, was able to look from outside myself, and was able to be amazed, and yet not be at all surprised, that a novocaine shot to the nuts felt exactly like a rocketing tennis ball to the nuts. That tiny part of my brain thought "I suppose it does make sense, and yet it is a fact that I would have never ever predicted, even in one thousand years."

Thankfully, unlike the shot with the tennis ball, the shot of novocaine numbed itself fairly quickly, but while I felt relief at the lessening of the pain, I also felt a growing sense of dread, because sure as the sun rises in the morning, I knew that whatever I was feeling over on my port side, I would soon be feeling over on my starboard side. I began to feel nauseous, and I knew that this little procedure was not almost over, this little procedure was just beginning.

With that, dear readers, I must once again bid you adieu, and once again I invite you to tune in tomorrow when I will tell you the chapter of when Tripp goes to a backyard barbecue.

Long Lake, Wisconsin

2009-12-08T11:50:00.021-06:00

Anyone joining the party here should go back here and read the story from the start. I really wish the blog tool allowed one to write things from the top down.

As you recall, dear readers, when last we left Tripp he was feeling trepidation, knowing that his future would follow one of two paths - he could face pain, humiliation, male fondling, and female hacking, or he could turn tail and he could run like a coward. Let us resume the story at that point . . .

As you can tell from my selection of words, I really had no choice. No choice at all. I dropped trou, dropped my drawers, and dropped my big butt down onto the medium-sized Pampers. I was thinking, among other things, "A medium Pampers? Really? At the world famous Mayo Clinic? I don't believe it!" I mean I didn't really expect, say, soft linens, or a chair cushioned with velvet, but couldn't the world famous Mayo Clinic have used a flat pad of some kind, or couldn't they have even used an adult-sized "Depends" sanitary garment?! Had the Clinic succumbed to some ill-advised suggestion from an employee so that the Mayo Clinic could save a few pennies by using baby products as a replacement for adult pads?! Was this the beginning of socialized medicine, weak coffee, and sugar rationing?!

As I was thinking this the male Nurse, whom I will now refer to as "Barry," because I have always disliked the name Barry, starting at my Senior Prom, and for a very good reason, which is a story for another post, the male nurse Barry was shackling my legs to the chair with the leather straps. "For your own safety and comfort," he told me. "Yeah, sure," I thought.

Then Barry told me how he needed to shave me before the procedure, and he told me he needed me to wait a minute, and he told me he needed to get the soap and water, and I thought "Wow, you are very needy," because I was starting to dislike him, but while that is what I thought, what I said was "I already shaved this morning, heh heh," which was a halfhearted attempt at banter, which he didn't hear, because he had already left the room. Sigh. I struggled, just a bit, to see how tight the leg restraints were, and they were plenty tight. Barry soon returned to the room with a bowl of water, a washcloth, some soap, and a razor.

Barry dipped the washcloth into the water and he applied the water to my most favorite paired body parts and ZOWEE - flashback number two - Long Lake, Wisconsin, in June.

At one point in my young adult life my parents had bought a boat, a very nice boat, a very nice boat with an inboard/outboard motor powerful enough to pull a water skier and which could go 35 mph, which is a very fast speed for a boat to go. That particular summer, the summer of my flashback, I had joined my parents, along with my younger brother and his friend, at Long Lake, Wisconsin, in June, for a much needed vacation. My parents allowed me and my younger brother and his friend to take the boat out for water skiing, and we had a blast. We had a BLAST.

There is one important thing that you need to know. The weather in June was pleasantly warm, perhaps 80 degrees, but the lake was in Northern Wisconsin, so the lake water was cold. In the shallows the water was tolerable, but in the deep part of the lake the water was cold, and I mean COLD!

So I was water-skiing for something like the fifth time that day, having a grand old time, when my brother decided it would be fun to try to make me fall. He started whipping the boat into tight turns, sending me flying around the corners, then swamping me, then sending me whipping around the other side. This was all great fun. GREAT fun. Until I fell. Wham!

Two things of note happened when I fell. The first thing that happened was merely a minor nuisance - the flotation belt that I had been wearing around my waist was forced up my chest and underneath my arms. I have always had a chest which is larger than my waist, which is very good in a manly way, but which is also very bad when a waist-sized belt is forced up one's body and around one's chest.

All in all, though, that was the least of my problems. My breathing was slightly constricted, as you might expect, but my biggest problem, which I sensed immediately, was that my family jewels, my testicles, my prized possessions, my source of all my future children, were retreating, fast, retreating to a place I never knew I had!

All you medical students already know that, during development in the womb, the male testicles descend from the abdomen into the scrotum, and the scrotum is a temperature control device, caring for the testicles like a mother Kangaroo cares for her Joey in her pouch. Well, without the nursing, of course. And the mother Kangaroos are female and not male. And, aw, forget it, bad analogy.

The thing was that when the freezing water hit my jewels those cojones retreated, instantly, ascending the path which they had previously descended so many years before, and they were literally knocking on my abdominal wall, battering it in a futile attempt to crawl back up through it in order to cuddle up next to my small intestines, seeking any warmth they could find.

That kind of feeling, that deep, strong clacking of innards, that futile attempt at an internal homecoming, that wrecking ball slamming into a steel wall feeling, that kind of feeling stays with a fella, like a flaw in a diamond, and that feeling is carried everywhere, and that feeling is usually forgotten, but every now and then, when the universe turns just right - ah, yup, there is that feeling again!

Yup. Back in the Procedure room at the Mayo Clinic, when Barry bathed my balls with icy water, I remembered that feeling. I FELT that feeling. My eggs turned to plums which turned to cherries which turned to pits. Barry explained that it was easier to shave the skin when it was 'firm.' "Ah," I thought, "Well, then, by all means, make things easy for yourself. Firm those puppies up like leeches in icy water. Poach those eggs. Get that fudge to the soft ball stage. We wouldn't want the shaving to be difficult for you now would we? Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy, that is what *I* always say. Bastard. Bastard Barry!"

So I sat, legs clamped down, jaw clamped shut, teeth clenched together, balls the size of cherry pits, and I watched a man shave my cold scrotum with a safety razor. And I thought about things. I thought about words, such as 'procedure' and 'just.' Yeah, I thought about words like that. And feminists.

And when Barry was finished, and when Barry was satisfied with his work, he dried me off with a towel, and he brought over a blessed heat lamp, to warm things up, and he said that the Doctor would be in shortly, and then he left.

As I sat under the heat lamp, warmth returning to my masculinity, I slowly unclenched, and I became more comfortable, and I relaxed, and I thought "Really, Tripp, that wasn't so bad was it? I hear the 'shaved' look is in now. Chicks dig smooth skin. Why, you are nearly European now." I wasn't really sure what "European" meant, in the scrotum sense, but I knew that I was now somehow exotic, and perhaps, somehow, chicks would dig my new exoticness, although I was not yet sure how I could work that feature into a conversation.

And as I relaxed, so did my scrotum, and the world became proper again, a place for everything, and everything in its place. Ahhh. Yeah. The procedure was almost over.

Thus ends this chapter of "How Tripp Manned up and met Mr. Sparky." Tune in tomorrow when we get to flashback to "Phantom baseball played with a tennis ball."

Into the "Procedure room."

2009-12-07T19:03:00.010-06:00

Anyone joining the party here should go back here and read the story from the start. I really wish the blog tool allowed one to write things from the top down.

As you recall, dear readers, when last we left the stalwart young feminist Tripp he was walking bravely into the "Procedure room," the room where the minor procedure, not much more than removing a splinter, really, was going to be performed. Let us resume the story there . . .

I walked calmly into the procedure room, shoulders back, chest out, with, I would like to think, a certain elegant ease which showed that not only did I have no fear, but which also showed that I was a man of the world, I was on top of my game, and certainly nothing as minor as just a vasectomy would knock me off of my pedestal.

I entered the "Procedure room" and Dr. Gray, the female Dr. Gray, left the room, presumably to wash up. I noticed that she had left and I thought, "Well, the whole point of the procedure, after all, is sterility. Ha Ha." I made myself laugh with my private little joke. Then I laughed a little more, to myself, and I impressed myself with how cool I was under the circumstances. "Tripp," I thought, "you are impressively cool under these circumstances."

A young man then walked in, and I presumed he was perhaps the towel boy, bringing linens, or perhaps a busboy of some kind, ready to clean away any clutter. I ignored him as he went to a cabinet and removed some cloths. I ignored him as he turned around, and I ignored him as he put a Pampers disposable diaper onto a chair. I did not ignore him when he instructed me to remove my pants, remove my underpants, and sit down on the chair. He instructed me to sit down on the chair with the Pampers curled halfheartedly on it like a mostly-dead fishing worm. He instructed me to sit down on the chair which I saw, when I looked at it closer, had leg restraints!? WTF?!

I realized, at that moment, that this young man was the Nurse, and I realized that it would be him who would be preparing me for the surgery. Yes, dear readers, you are understanding me correctly. You get the picture. I got the picture. A MAN would be pseudo-fondling my, um, wedding tackle, and a WOMAN would be hacking away at my vas deferens, my sacred manhood. Um, I mean she would be performing the little snip snip.

That was the first moment when it occurred to me that this minor event in my life, this teeny tiny little 'procedure thing' may not go exactly as I had planned. That was the moment when I knew, as much as any man knows any thing, that I had a choice - I had a very distinct choice. I could "Man up" and get fondled by a man and hacked by a woman, or I could bolt from the room and never come back, and face a lifetime of condoms and a lifetime of condemnations and a lifetime of pointed reminders about the time when Tripp ran like the wind.

Once again, I must leave you, dear readers. I am called elsewhere. But tune in tomorrow for the next chapter in the story of "How Tripp Manned up and met Mr. Sparky."

My Date with Sparky

2009-12-07T11:56:00.010-06:00

My Date with Sparky

Alright, Dear Readers, I get the message, stop with the emails. Too much hard science and misty angst makes Tripp a dull blogger. Okay, today I am in the mood for some humor, and I am in the mood for some fun.

Gather round, boys and girls. Please come in close. Closer. Leave room for the little ones. Everyone comfy? Good.

I would like to tell you the story of the day when Tripp “Manned up and met Mr. Sparky.”

Now before we start with the story, I want to make sure that we all understand the details and the background and the context for this story. Sally, please explain to Timmy what context means, but do it quietly. Thank you.

As we all know, the purpose of life is to create more life. And as we also all know, God has made us so that we are nudged, or even compelled, to serve our purpose, and because our God is a good God, our God uses positive reinforcement instead of negative reinforcement to compel us. Let us thank our God for this. “Thanks God! Thank you for making us horny!!”

Now in addition to giving us the compulsion to make more life, God also gives us a brain to realize that there must be balance in everything. Some people call this balance "harmony," some call it the "yin and the yang," and, yes, Little Timmy? Do you know what we call it? . . . That’s right, Little Timmy, we do call it common sense. You are a smart boy.

So after Tripp lived long enough to reproduce, meaning he lived long enough to create life, much life, nearly too much life, Tripp’s brain told him that he had also created a debt load, a very large and a very heavy debt load that would take years to pay off. Since Tripp was no dummy, having, after all, survived long enough to reproduce, he decided that his baby-making days were over. Mrs. Tripp agreed with this, and she agreed with it so much that they discussed all the possible options, meaning Mrs. Tripp said “Just get a vasectomy.”

I am pretty sure that somewhere in the feminist handbook, after the entry stating that “All men must now be in the delivery room during their wife’s labor to view, first hand, the holy hell they have put their wives through,” there is another entry that states “In matters of castration it is the MAN who MUST undergo the, as I used to call it, “snip snip,” and if your man balks at this remind him of the holy hell of labor that you experienced, and remind him that unlike tubal ligation, which is a MAJOR surgery, and which may lead to major legal litigation, a vasectomy is just minor surgery, so trivial that it is often done as an outpatient procedure.

Did you see that? Tubal ligation is MAJOR surgery, but a vasectomy is just a minor procedure, nothing more, really, than getting one’s hair cut. A snip here, a snip there, and off one goes, to the Opera, or places like that.

Since I am a feminist, I totally agreed with this. Well, I also agreed because Mrs. Tripp refused to go back on the pill, and it was either the snip snip or condoms, and I dislike condoms. They are too tight. And too short. Heh heh.

So I made the appointment at the most excellent (and conveniently located) Mayo Clinic, second in the nation only to John’s Hopkins. Curse you John’s Hopkins!

At my appointment the first thing I found out is this: The Mayo Clinic would be very happy to perform the snip snip, but not while one’s spouse is still pregnant. I suppose this makes sense, because what if there are problems with the baby? Would one change his mind? Also, since one has already knocked up one’s wife, one did not NEED birth control at that time, unless one was catting around, and would one like one’s spouse to know that??

This was very sensible, and I was *not* catting around, so I waited, and there was only one problem with that. When I do something like this I like to DO it and get it over with. Anticipation is a killer for me. In class, if we needed to give a speech, I always volunteered to go first, to get it over with. Unfortunately, there was no volunteering early for the snip snip, and I had to wait until my fourth child was delivered.

Finally, though, the day came. Our newborn was safely out into the world, and it was time to plug the dam.

I went into the office, the urology office, and they asked me if I had any preferences of Doctor? I did not. I knew none of them, and I figured they were all good, so I said “the first one that can do it would be fine.” I was scheduled to see Dr Gray at 1 PM.

I left, and when I returned at 1 PM I was sent to a room next to the, um, procedure room. I waited a few minutes, and in walked Dr. Gray. A female Dr Gray. It was flashback time, dear readers. I warn you that, while this is the first flashback, there will be more coming during the telling of this tale. If you are prone to motion sickness I suggest you put on your Dramamine patch now, so it will be in effect later, when you need it.

The flashback was to my college days. Specifically, to a February 14th, Valentine’s day, when I had friends visiting, and when none of us had dates. The bars were full of couples, moony-eyed couples, and no self-respecting female would come into the bar on Valentine’s day without a date, so my pals and I were lonely. Very lonely. We yearned for the soothing touch of a young lass, or, at least, for the companionship of a girl.

Somehow our conversation turned to a local establishment called “The Velvet Touch Massage Parlor.” Oh, yeah, now you can see where this is going. Somehow, the deal was that my two pals would pay the bill and I would get the, ahem, service, and then I would report back to them everything that happened, complete with all the details. Even back then I was known as a pretty good story teller, and if the story wasn’t just right, I could always fake it to make it great.

I recall that, at the “Velvet Touch,” I was instructed to take a shower, in a very dark room, and “Monica” would be right in after I was done. I recall that the soap in the shower was Ivory soap, “99.44% pure.” I could smell the soap, and when I recalled the slogan I thought “99.44% pure? Not after tonight.”

So when I met Dr. Gray, the female urologist at the Mayo Clinic, (did you see how quickly I zoomed back to the present time, from the flashback? I warn you, fasten your seat belts, and keep your head pressed firmly back into the headrest, because the way I am whipping around my timeline you might get whiplash!) I flashed back to the moment, at the “Velvet Touch massage Parlor,” when I was showered and soaped and 99.44% pure, and when I waited to meet “Monica,” the first woman who would ever intimately examine my, um, wedding tackle. All the insecurities that I felt back then, at the “Velvet Touch,” came tumbling back to me at the Mayo Clinic. “What if I get hard? What if I don’t? What if I like it? What if I don’t? What if the Vikings *never* win the Superbowl?”

I listened to Dr. Gray cautioning me that a vasectomy is NOT reversible, but if I did want it reversed, they could do it. She mentioned it was just a minor procedure, and it almost NEVER failed, but it might. I listened and I became a little more at ease. I was older than I had been at the "Velvet Touch." I had experience. I was practically a man of the world. Given a choice, let’s face it, I would much rather have a woman messing with my, um, tackle than have a man messing with it. This was going to be all right. Yeah. I was cool. I was ready. I was, like, "Let’s do this puppy!"

This post is plenty long, so I will post it now, and continue the story later.

Coming up next – Into the “Procedure room.”

Have you ever caught a glimpse of the divine?

2009-11-27T21:58:00.001-06:00

Have you ever looked at a photograph of a group of people and had one image stand out? Have you ever looked at a person and felt their smile like the sun on a warm day, and when you smile back the sunbeams become golden? Have you ever thought that if you were Adam then absolutely positively this other person was Eve, created by God just for you?

Have you ever felt the pain of deep, whole, true love, love that is lost, love that is completely lost?

What do you do, then, when against all hope you get a glimmer of a chance at the same thing again? What if you find Eve, but you know that this will, ultimately, one way or another, result in another loss for you as deep or deeper than the first? What would you do then?

I'll tell you what I do. I feel a nibble of the pain, and then I suck it up, and I build up my courage, and I look at the sunbeam as best I can, and I try to soak up every single little bit of it - the sight, the sound, the taste, the feel, the smell, every moment of it, for as long as it lasts. I try to linger in every single moment, neither looking back nor looking forward, and I try to stop time and stay and dawdle for every single fraction of a second.

This probably makes me look pretty goofy when I do it, and pretty stupid, but when you catch sight of the meteor glowing across the sky you don't take your eye off it. When you see the diver spinning towards the water you don't blink. And by God if an angel floats in front of you you don't think of yesterday or tomorrow, you don't even think, you just be, for as long as you can, where you are.

Because time *will* move on, and this may be the first time you feel the sunbeam, or it may be one of many times, or it may be the last time you feel it. So you stop, and you gaze, and you hope that you never lose the memory, because as long as you have that then you have more than most people ever have.

And if you experience the loss then you grieve, and you take all the time it takes, and then you wait for the next chance to catch a glimpse of the divine.

O. M. G.

2009-11-27T17:27:00.002-06:00

WOW!!!!!!!!!!!

Chillin' . . . waitin' . . . nice

2009-11-27T13:47:00.007-06:00

Dear Readers, have you ever had the chance, the extra time, the lack of obligations, to sit, at ease, quietly, and simply chill out? I am doing that right now, and it is great, but the best part is something extra, there is something extra, there is something in the air, something in the music, something in my head, there is a sense of calm anticipation. I think something is going to happen, something big, something personal, something important, and something deeply and fundamentally good.

Have they started the LHC at CERN and had a meaningful collision? It is 8:40 PM there, a week after they got the beams working both directions - that could be it.

No, that is not it. That is not the feeling. This feeling is not like the rush of scientific discovery. No, the feeling is more like the feeling before a cool front comes on an oppressively hot muggy day, the feeling is anticipation of release. But this happens to be a beautiful cool but sunny fall day. The weather is not oppressive. I am not uncomfortable. I am already at ease. What is going on here?!

I am at a Starbucks. Is it because the sales staff are not overworked, is it because they are friendly and helpful and nice? No.

I had some really deep, meaningful talks with my birth family this Thanksgiving, with my parents and my dear sister, and my Mother is recovering, nicely, from an illness, is that it? No. That is not it.

No, I know what it is, and I've been teasing you, Dear Readers, playing with you just a bit, because I think I know what is coming. I know why I have this feeling, and right now things are very nice. Very very nice indeed.

If I am right about this, and if I am in the right mood, later, I'll let you know what happens. For now, Dear Readers, I must leave you hanging. It is about 1:59 Central time, GMT-6, on 11/27/2009, and if my feeling is right, whatever happens will happen soon, after 2:00, possibly right at 2:00.

Here it is!!!!!!

Ain't I the devil?

Heehee.

Thanksgiving

2009-11-25T11:34:00.004-06:00

Dear Readers,

It is time for the annual Thanksgiving post. Well, okay, my first annual Thanksgiving post, but still, *the* annual Thanksgiving post. I hope you will forgive me for a rather, well, spiritual post, but today I am in the mood for spirit.

Today I give thanks for my soulmates. What do I mean by 'soulmates?' It is very hard to describe, and I certainly cannot describe it in terms of objective reality. Hence my journey, for a few minutes, off the deep end of reality and into the spirit realm.

My soulmates are people with which I have a very special connection. A unique connection. The connection is real, but it is subtle, and it is very deep. There is no fighting the connection. there is no severing the connection. It just is.

Can I prove the existence of soulmatedness? No, of course not. There is no physical experiment, no objective measurement, no testable hypothesis that can be made to prove the connection. The soulmate connection is about feelings, very strong but very subtle feelings. So soulmates belong in the realm of faith, which is belief without proof, and the subject of soulmates belongs with other spiritual topics such as religion.

I had thought that today I would be giving thanks for all of reality, and for the spirit of discovery. I expected this because of my recent quest to CERN in Geneva Swizerland. Yet, surprise surprise, reality exceeds my expectations, and I find myself giving thanks not for reality, but for a soulmate. I give thanks for one particular soulmate.

This soulmate is especially important to me because this year, in arguably my deepest hour, during my neediest time, I reconnected with this soulmate whom I had only the slightest previous inkling of, just a vague feeling, and yet out of the blue I reconnected big time, and there was no denying it, I had a soulmate right when I needed one most.

I have nothing more than a hunch, but I suspect that perhaps this deep connection has something to do with the underlying vibration of the universe, the vibration that I suspect is responsible for the manifestation of what we see as objective reality. As I say, this is my speculation, and it is totally subjective. Shoot, it is downright oogie boogie, but I know that many people throughout history have written about similar things, and I think I am starting to see what they meant. Have I 'lost it?' Maybe. Is my desperation clouding my judgment? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Even so, what can I do? What can I do with my knowledge of a soulmate but give thanks to God? Dear readers, you tell me.

This is a connection that goes beyond anything else, beyond the physical, beyond the emotional, and in the spiritual realm the connection borders on the connection to God.

I know, without a doubt, that I would die for my soulmate. For my soulmate I would endure anything for any length of time, just as I would for my kids, although my children are not my soulmates. My soulmates, for the most part, seem to be selected from my peers. My knowledge of my soulmates is one of the things that gives a purpose to my life. My knowledge of my soulmates provides comfort when I despair. This knowledge verifies the existence of God for me.

Yeah, it is a big thing.

And for this thing, this huge thing, this singular thing, here and now, I give Thanks!

Thank you, God! thank you for showing me this soulmate. Thank you very much!

About things sucking . . .

2009-11-22T22:03:00.004-06:00

My most faithful commenter, Lynda3, commented on my usage of what I thought was a rather clever word - "suckitude," and that made me think of a question that I have had for a long long time.

Perhaps one of my faithful readers can help me answer my question.

I am certain that every single person in the US, and probably even every single person in the entire developed world, has heard the word "suck" used to mean something bad. For example, the pejorative declaration "you suck," or the ubiquitous declaration "this sucks." My question is this - what is the item that is being sucked? I would like to fill in the blank - "you suck - ?"

Obviously genitalia springs to mind, because genitalia *always* springs to mind. We are, after all, human, the most sex-obsessed creatures on the Earth. But if so, why is sucking genitalia 'bad?' Is one claiming that the other person is, essentially a slut? Declaring, for example, that - "you suck large amounts of random genitalia" - as opposed to declaring, I suppose - "you suck genitalia that is screened by using at least a rudimentary set of standards for your selection criteria," - which let's face it, is pretty much what everybody does, we just differ on the standards we use.

Or is the "you sucks" pejorative a reference to the old homophobia, declaring, in essence, that the person being slammed is 'gay.' Saying, to a man - you suck dick, - or saying, to a woman - you suck the most intimate and beautiful portion of a woman's anatomy?

Or does the phrase imply bestiality? I know that I have specifically heard the phrase "This sucks donkey dicks" which is not only very nicely alliterative but which also expresses a very strong taboo.

And another possibility - is the phrase scatological, reaching even further back into our development - declaring that one sucks excrement?

I think one could make a case for any of these possibilities, hence the answer remains a mystery to me.

Can anyone help me out here?

Aw man . . .

2009-11-21T18:25:00.000-06:00

Check this out! Freaking son of a Heisenberg uncertainty!!

Yeah, they got the beams working, in both directions, on Friday, just four freaking days after I was there. My friends say I must have inspired them. Yeah. Nice try, trying to make me feel better.

But this is not the very final step. They did not say what energy they had the beams circulating with, and they for sure did not say they achieved a collision.

On the other hand I know they are working weekends, and they like to be conservative with their estimates, so I wouldn't be surprised if this very weekend they have a 3.5 TeV collision! Perhaps. Obviously this is all speculation on my part. I have no direct knowledge of what is happening, just slightly educated guesses.

Was the trip worth it?

2009-11-19T20:08:00.000-06:00

The inevitable question - was my trip to Geneva and CERN "worth it?"
For me, oh yeah, the trip was worth the time and money and hassle and sore muscles and whatever else the cost may end up being to my personal life. I have no doubt at all that this trip was, indeed, "worth it."

I have never, ever taken a trip like this before. In essence I went to a foreign place and I wondered around. I had only the barest of plans or schedules - one half of one day scheduled at CERN. I also pretty much expected one day of jet-lag recovery, so you could say that day was planned as well. Other than that, though, I had no firm plans at all.

I made mistakes - a ton of mistakes. For example a couple days I ate expensive breakfast at my hotel. Even then, even though it was a buffet, the food was amazing. I think everything was very fresh, because the scrambled eggs tasted like no eggs I had ever had before. The same with the cheese. I'll admit the chocolate was nice, too, but truth be told chocolate is not my 'thing,' which is probably good because I could have gained a lot of weight if chocolate was my thing.

My hotel tax covered free city transportation, meaning buses, trains, trolleys, and even water taxis, and I also got a free shuttle ride to and from the airport whenever I wanted it. For most trips the airport was my first stop, because the airport had a rail link to the main train station, and the main train station linked to, well, everywhere. BUT you had to know what you were doing, and I cannot tell you how many times I got on the wrong train or the wrong bus. But so what? When I figured out I was going the wrong direction I got off at the next stop, crossed the street or tracks (looking both ways first), and I got on the bus or train going back in the other direction.

The one time that I did have an absolute 'appointment,' for my tour of CERN, I did not go to the airport first, because that was backtracking. Instead I set off on foot to catch bus number 56 that the desk clerk said would stop "right over there" and which would go directly to CERN but you know what? I could not find the bus stop! That was the only time I met someone who was vaguely rude. On the road I stopped at a small garage and asked the guy sweeping the steps for the way to the bus stop, and he pointed me to the mechanic, who said, in French, more or less, "buzz off I only speak French!" Frankly I had expected more of that around the city, but that was the *only* time it happened. So I went back on the small road and walked farther and saw a small sign that said "bus stop" with an arrow. I waited a few minutes at the stop, in the middle of nowhere, and realized the sign did not mean that _this_ was the bus stop, the sign was showing the directions to _a_ bus stop! Bwahahahaha. I walked that direction and followed a couple more of those signs when I saw a real bus stop with a bunch of twenty-somethings waiting there. It looked like the areas had modest apartment complexes, and I figured they were probably heading to work. I was pretty sure I wanted the number 56 bus, which terminated right at CERN, and wouldn't you know it but the number 56 bus showed up, so I got on it.

We took a windy path and the hour that I had budgeted for my fifteen minute trip to CERN was ticking away, and we stopped at various stops, and when the bus route ended I got off and looked around and - no CERN. I walked around a bit and, still, no CERN anywhere! Looking back on it, I suspect that the same bus route may run both directions and I had gotten on the bus headed in the wrong direction! That is what I think happened, but at the time I looked at my map and it seemed I was way off course. I caught a bus going the other direction going to an area that I could see on my map, figuring I needed to get back to a known location. Oh, did I mention that CERN itself was off the edge of my map? Yes, it was just a tiny bit off the edge of the map, but I had been assured that it was absolutely "in that direction."

By the time I got on the right number 56 bus that actually said CERN on the front (I was learning where to look) it was already time for my tour to start, and the confirmation email from CERN had reminded me that if I was late for my tour time I might miss the tour entirely. But what could I do? I got to CERN fifteen minutes late and as it turned everything was okay. Earlier, a large tour group of students had been late for *their* tour, so the whole schedule was pushed back, and I was fine!! Whew.

I did try to get a geographical sense of where the buses and trains were taking me, a mental map of the area, but the roads were not laid out in grids, and the terrain was hilly and frequently the road was lower than the countryside, so I could not actually see where I was going much of the time.

Here is one tip I offer to my dear readers for orienting around Geneva - if you have no compass and it is overcast so you cannot see the sun, or even the mountains for that matter, you can still always find South, or close to it. Do you want to know how? Look for the small satellite dishes!! Bless their hearts, those little babies are on many of the buildings and they all point their happy little faces in the same direction, day and night, rain or shine. Follow the dishes, my readers, follow the dishes.

Back to my trip - besides my CERN tour I spent most of my time wondering around Geneva, and looked, and sketched (WTF?!), and rested, and most of my time I had the oddest feeling. I do not have the words to describe it, but I think the word "poignancy" may come the closest to it. I felt that I greatly liked this place, and I felt that they clearly were doing many things right. Perhaps it is because Switzerland is so old, and, I dunno, mature compared to the US. Perhaps they have had more time to get things right. Perhaps Europe is more like a beautiful park and the US is more like a shopping mall. In addition I felt sad, too, because I knew after leaving I would greatly miss the place, and I have been so disappointed with so much of America lately. So many of our problems have solutions and yet we are prevented from seeing and implementing them. I think we get a HUGE amount of disinformation and we don't even know it, and that makes me sad, too.

And the people around Geneva - the way they behaved. It is so hard to describe. Calm, perhaps. Civilized. Enjoying life.

I suspect all the walking, up and down hills, helps them be a little more fit than we are just as a matter of course, and they dress smartly because of it. No bright colors, a lot of grey and black, but I must admit that women my age look damn sharp in a black sweater and grey skirt and black leggings, and black boots too! I didn't expect to see that. And people seem to accept their sexuality. It was like it was okay for men to be men and for women to be women. And I hope you know I am a feminist from way back, but this was . . . different! And boy does it kill my macho image to say this, but some of the places were just so . . . I dunno, sweet. One walking bridge that I used had nice benches on it, and the view was great, and I swear I saw three couples, over the age of 35, kissing gently, right in broad daylight. I couldn't believe it, and yet - why not? Why not?

So I was sad, and I got tired, and I got sore muscles, but by the end of the day I slept VERY well, either because of the walking or the fresh air or the mental challenge of seeing novelty and having to figure things out. I slept well indeed.

And so while this trip was not FUN, as in amusement park fun, and the trip was actually very poignant, I think it was also very rich, for lack of a better word. I saw few museums, I mostly saw mundane things, and yet they were not mundane to me.

Because of all of that I think this trip was very much worth "it." Frankly I'm a little surpised more people don't do this kind of thing. Maybe I just haven't noticed, I dunno.

If anyone has their own travel stories to tell I sure would like to hear them.

Geneva and the Internet and watching TV

2009-11-19T19:52:00.000-06:00

I think that perhaps one of the things that made my stay in Geneva so nice is the fact that for the entire time I watched zero TV. For one thing, it was mostly in French, and also - come on - who would go through all the trouble to get to Geneva and then spend his/her time watching TV? Seriously. I did, however, spend a fair amount of time on the internet, some of it social, and I think that, to me, the topics of watching TV and socializing on the internet are a little related.

If you have read much of this blog you must know by now that I LOVE me some internet. It is the biggest, baddest, bestest research tool that any academic junkie could ever hope for. Plus it is GREAT for personal business such as banking and shopping, and also it has more or less paid my salary for many years, so as I said, I LOVE me some internet. As an aside, did you know CERN was the birthplace of the web?! No lie! They started it as a research tool, to help them coordinate work and share results. I tell you these people really have their act together. Together, man!!

So I love me some internet, but I have never, until recently, used it for interpersonal human interaction. At work, my preference is face to face, then email or chat, and then phone, mostly because when I worked globally it was so much easier to communicate technical information remotely via typing. Imagine trying to _tell_ someone a long URL over the phone? Then imagine that when you try to do that the listener does not speak your language? Argg.

Because of all of that I am very comfortable with typing and 'chatting,' or 'sametiming' if you use Lotus products.

Still, my first foray into social networking was kind of a flop. I've been thinking about why that is, and I think I have put my finger on it, but I am not completely sure. Please realize these are my personal statements, and not an indictment or criticism of anything or anyone that enjoys social networking on the web, bless their hearts.

For me, in a nutshell, I found social networking to be extremely compelling and yet completely unfulfilling. I was really getting hooked on it, to the point where I would always check messages the first thing when I signed on, and before I did anything else. And you know me, if I did get a message I would usually respond with a message two or three times the length, never at a loss for words. For me getting and responding to the messages was the compelling and the addicting part.

The unfulfilling part, for me, I think, is similar to my experience with watching TV. Watching TV and internet socializing feel meaningful and yet for me they are lacking so much _here_, and so so _now_. How can you stay in the moment with someone when you are not even in the same room with him/her? I am pretty much a reality freak, meaning for me the HERE and NOW are really important, and watching TV or chatting are simply no substitute for the real thing. I've never been much for watching someone else do something, I've always been a lot bigger on actually doing it, or at least trying it. So I pretty much suck at internet social networking.

The worst part of this, dear readers, is that I must make a confession. I think I may have hurt someone, someone I care about, because of my suckitude. I tried to use social networking to enhance real life, but I found out soon enough that I am bad at it, very bad at it. It can be a nice way to give brief status, and to stay in superficial touch, but any more than that and my goodness, do I really screw it up.

I had to disconnect for awhile because it is just not my thing, more's the pity. As I said. my thing is the _here_, my thing is the _now_, and my thing is the full monty, not the shadow world.

Sigh.

How I Lost Ten Pounds in One Day and Lived to Brag about it.

2009-11-19T19:49:00.002-06:00

Here I hinted about losing ten pounds in one day, and I thought I might explain how that came to be. Before I get into that, though, I must say that if you want to get most anyone's attention, all you have to do is mention losing ten pounds in one day and you've got their 100% undivided focus for about as long as you want it.

Speaking of that, I kinda try to practice a little Zen or Eastern religion myself. At many times I like to 'stay in the moment,' as they say in acting class. When I do that the most remarkable things can happen. Not always, of course, but sometimes, especially when dealing with people.

I think, though I haven't formally learned this, that many times when people are having a conversation when they should be listening they are instead thinking about what they are going to say next. This makes sense, because in a normal conversation there is a normal back and forth, where each person takes turn speaking. But another thing I have learned from studying scripts is that many times, during a dialogue or conversation, there is one person who is more or less driving the discussion and the other person is more or less along for the ride. As a side note, memorizing the 'driver' part is more difficult than memorizing the 'passenger' part, because the driver is responsible for the direction of the conversation.

What I am suggesting that you do, at least once, when in a conversation, is to try to intentionally take the 'passenger role.' Forget about composing what you will say. Instead, not only listen to the other person, but listen with all your senses - hear the words, watch their expressions, feel the temperature, smell the smells. Do NOT touch their bodies though. Unh uh. That would be WAY too 'active' of a listening style. Well, actually, a touch on the shoulder or arm works very well, but you better be REALLY good at this before you try that, or BAD BAD things will happen.

Is this 'staying in the moment?' think so, or at least that is my interpretation. If you try this, at least a few times, it can become second nature. Your body will become still, and if you get really good at it you will find yourself subtly echoing the other person's gestures, and when that happens something rather remarkable can happen. For yourself - you will get so much more out of the talk, because instead of being lost in your own thoughts and speeches, which you probably already know by heart, you will be seeing and hearing something *new*. In addition, and here is the freaky part, the _other_ person will also change somewhat. Somehow they can sense the difference, although usually it is a subtle feeling only, but they will become, I dunno, more spontaneous and more into the conversation. If you think about it in a certain way, you could consider this listening style to be a gift you are giving to the other person, the gift of your full attention, although in reality you are really giving the gift to yourself. Or maybe a gift to both of you! Either way, I think it is a worthwhile thing to do, and if nothing else it can jazz up a boring day.

But back to the weight loss. Yes, I truly did lose ten pounds in about eight hours, under a Doctor's supervision. Maybe I fibbed a bit though, because what I actually did was gain about four pounds first, then lose the ten pounds. Then gain back the six, back to my original weight.

I don't know if I mentioned it before but one of the perks of living near the Mayo Clinic is that I can participate, for pay, in a number of medical studies. Yeah, I know, the Seinfeld episode, which I have heard all about but have never actually seen. From what I gather the studies I have been in are sort of like the TV show, only with no writers, and are much less humorous.

I don't remember exactly what this particular study was for, something about something, but the bottom line was that they first ensured I was pumped sufficiently with potassium and other electrolytes and then they drained me like a lizard. They said that when one loses ten pounds of fluids one is at risk of having an electrolyte imbalance, so that is why they had to prime the pump, so to speak. Also, I should mention I am a big guy, over 200 pounds, so ten pounds was only about 5% of my body weight.

The study required a day in the hospital and then an overnight stay in the hospital and then part of the next day, so I got about four free hospital meals out of the deal too, woo hoo! They had me on a pretty big IV the first day, pumping me with fluids. I had never had such a large IV before, into the back of my hand, and the chill was a little, as the medical people say, 'uncomfortable,' although not terrible.

Then they hit me with Lasiks, which the nurses said means "lasts six" hours. Wow! That stuff dried me out faster than an etoh/caffeine combo. I was _in_ the bathroom more than I was out of it. And I dropped the ten pounds with no problem. I actually could feel the difference in my waist size when I went home. It felt really good. But it lasted only about six hours. After six or eight hours, as I am sure you have already guessed, I gained the six pounds back. Water weight comes back as quickly as it is lost, which I suppose is a good thing, because in many ways our body is a giant beaker of chemical reactions which all require water in one way or the other, and to stay that dehydrated for long would not be healthy.

But there you have it, how I lost ten pounds in eight hours and lived to brag about it!

My CERN trip is getting closer

2009-11-04T12:25:00.000-06:00

My trip to CERN is getting closer. So far the news I get from the CERN Couirer is good news. The injector ring is working fine, and they have injected low speed protons through a couple of the sectors in the main ring. Unfortunately for me, this time they are taking a very cautious, step by step approach, with the tentative goal of full ring running in both directions and a 3.5TeV collision before Christmas. That energy is about half of what the ring should be able to do, and will not generate any new data that we haven't seen before. Still, it will be a very good bringup test of the entire system.

I can't really fault them for being so cautious. Last year the heat problem the encountered in September was a big setback. They designed a new quench system so if it happens again it will not take out so many sectors, and they designed new test procedures for the connections so they will spot resistance before it gets too hot. And they have been quiet about the bringup schedule. All this makes total sense but for people like me and the press it is difficult to not have a planned 'ribbon cutting' point in time so I can be there at that exact time.

Who knows, though, if they made this like the Superbowl I probably wouldn't be able to get tickets, so I am not complaining.

Four letter words

2009-10-21T15:28:00.000-05:00

OK, come on, I know what you were thinking (don't even try to lie about it!) but that is not what I meant. I have plenty to say about profanity, vulgarity, and cursing, but that will have to wait.

No, I'm talking about a very, very common word that I bet nearly every English speaker uses, a word which has just four letters, and yet it speaks volumes. It speaks encyclopedias of meaning.

Go ahead, guess what word I am talking about. Really. Guess. It only takes a second.

Did you guess mpwf? Every letter shifted left one letter. And no, I DON'T mean nwxg - I said to shift left, not right.

That is a good guess, and probably a great guess, and it actually does fit my hints, but it is just not it. No, there have already been tons and tons written about that, and I'll save my comments on that topic for another post.

Here is another hint - I have used the word at least twice already in this post. Does that help?

No more teasing then, my word is kvtu. Shift left.

In my experience, that word (I'll refer to it as TW from now on) has incredible power to change discussions in ways that are usually not obvious unless you look out for it.

Let us imagine that one is trying to clean out one's garage, a chore which one has told one's spouse that one would do last weekend, but one began and soon stopped because, say, one had too many bikes left over from kids and whatnot that are cluttering up the place, and one tried to think up the best solution to that problem.

So the conversation between one and one's spouse goes as follow:

S: I thought you said you'd clean out the garage last weekend.
O: I know, but I got started on it and then I didn't know what to do with the bikes, and . . .
S: Why didn't you just take care of it?
O: I was trying to figure out where to put them all . . .
S: Why didn't you just mount them on the wall like we talked about last summer?

Did you notice TW? What does this word mean when used in the above phrases? What is this word saying, actually? This word is saying "You are trying to give some complicated explanation for not doing something that is so easy and so trivial that it is not even worth bringing up." This word reminds me of two sayings I have heard, one from my high school football coach, and one from a counselor I once had. My football coach would say, when you tried to explain why you didn't accomplish what he wanted you to, "No excuses, just results!" A counselor told me that was a common trait among humans. "Nobody wants to hear about the labor pains, they just want to see the baby."

So look out when someone uses TW when talking to you.

Now, there isn't much you can really do about the words someone else uses, but there is an even worse use of TW that you can actually do a LOT about.

Listen to see if you ever use that word. I don't mean when talking to someone else, although it would be nice if you stopped doing that to other people, even though they won't really notice it and thank you for it, but they will probably have a general feeling that you are less obnoxious than you might have been.

No, I mean if you are describing to someone else something which you have done, something you have accomplished, try to NEVER use TW. I learned this in an acting class, and someday I'll talk about acting, which I really really like, and which is full of a lot of BAD advice but also some really good advice if you meet the right people.

This is some of the good advice - if someone actually does want to hear about what you have done then leave out TW. For example, let us say someone visits and notices the new colors you have painted in your living room. They'll say something like "Hey, nice colors here" (unless they are jerks and then why on earth did you invite them into your house?) and if you say "Oh, I just picked out some colors and painted" it sounds like that was a trivial thing to do, as if one was saying "Oh, I just turned on the tap and out came the water" when the truth is there was more to it than that, probably a lot more to it. You probably took some time to consider what would look best, you took the time to pick out the best paint, and then you took some time to convince your spouse he needed to paint the living room even though he just painted it last year.

So you did not "just picked out some colors and painted." You 'picked out some colors and painted," which is an accomplishment, and you deserve credit for that, even if by 'painted' you mean "convinced my spouse to paint and had to put up with all his grumblings."

Take credit for what you have done!

How I see we boomers

2009-10-20T12:39:00.000-05:00

Jeff Mincey over at Everyday Citizen posted about the character of we boomers, and asked for root causes. I commented with my assessment of things. I certainly do not know these things _for sure_, but it is the way I see the world at this time. I guess time will tell if I am correct. What do you think?

Jeff,
I cannot really dispute your characterization of we boomers, although you do tend to paint with too broad a brush.
I wanted to say that there are well know root causes for our generation being the way it is, and this is not really a character issue at all. We boomers simply did what everyone does, we reacted to our circumstances in the best way we could.
Shared adversity enhances certain character traits - a sense of community, pulling together, and looking out for each other. The adversity of WWII did not affect the US the same way as it affected other countries. Much of the so-called 'socialism' in the developed world was a result of the adversity those people faced during WWII.
In addition, after WWII the US was the only first-world country left un-devastated. After WWII the powers that be in the US, the 'captains of industry,' designed a plan for the remainder of the twenty-first century. Those with real power designed the system we now have - they designed the global economy which would have the US on top, and the US citizens would be the consumers that provide the 'engine' for the global economy. These designers recruited academia, primarily the economic Professors, and they persuaded and then bought the politicians to make the laws.
This was an intentional plan, and they even made parts of it public. That plan worked to a degree. The problem we now face is that the global economy plan is not, ultimately, sustainable. Increasing population and consumption are meeting resource constraints.
Powerful forces wanted the boomers to be materialistic and consumers. Powerful forces wanted to keep most of the profits for themselves, so wages went stagnant and US citizens responded by first bringing their spouses into the workplace, then working longer hours, borrowing against their homes, and finally going into even greater debt to maintain their lifestyles.
Those are the root causes for why we boomers did what we did. I think most people who have studied this agree with that.
The question, now, is who has the real power at this time, and what will be their plan for the twenty-first century? I think we peons can influence that, a little, but for the most part we are as powerless as we have always been.
The traditional western solutions to a crisis like this are either through a hero, or through a champion.
Obama is the 'hero,' an outsider with good character who comes in to break the status quo and create a new status quo, but it is looking like he will not be able to do that, although the jury is still out.
The second solution would be a champion, someone who is already powerful, a member of the ultra-rich, someone who wants to change things, and someone who can convince enough of his peers to rally around him. Will such a champion emerge? Who knows? None have so far.
If neither of these things happen we face either a revolution or a slow, painful decline.

On being left-handed

2009-10-20T12:34:00.000-05:00

In the comments nepata brought up the topic of left-handedness which, since I are one, has always been of interest to me. While I know about some of the bad ways that lefties used to be treated, I don't recall that I was ever the subject of any bad treatment. About the worst thing that ever happened was always getting pencil-lead on my hand as I wrote, because my hand trailed over the existing writing instead of leading it. To a small degree I was also a tiny bit handicapped when learning sports, such as learning how to correctly throw a ball, but fairly quickly I learned to 'mirror' the example, as if I was watching myself in a mirror, and that seemed to work about very well. Even now, when I demonstrate throwing technique to my youth softball team, we are able to stand face to face and they can see me and mimic me as if I was in a mirror, and that teaching technique seems to work quite well.

I think the first time I really noticed being left handed was in about fifth grade, when we learned about Leonardo Da Vinci, who was also left handed. For awhile he became my hero, and I even learned to write backwards just like he did. It was fairly easy to do at the time, and I can still write cursive from right to left, mirror writing, with little difficulty.

I dislike people who are, in my opinion, too sensitive to perceiving prejudice, so I don't really get into the poor-me stories about being a lefty. Please don't get me wrong, though. I know that there are actual cases of discrimination going on in the world, and I totally despise that, probably because in a tiny way I know what it is like to feel different. I hate that crap! Seriously. But there is a line between actual discrimination and non-discrimination, and the line exists, and I don't like people who cross over that line and perceive discrimination when it is not there. People like that are way too hard to be around, and I choose not to be around them.

Back to left-handedness. In part being left-handed is why I took up the French Horn (which is now, apparently, simply called the 'Horn' by snooty people, so la-di-dah to them), because you press the valves with your left hand, but overall I don't think that matters much, and I've played trumpet and mellophone, pressing the valves with my right hand with little problem. Same with the guitar. I play the chords with my left and strum with my right, which is the same as most right-handers, and I can't say it really has mattered to me. Maybe if I was super great or something, but as an amateur I can do okay the way I do it. Same with batting. In essence my torso twists one way when I throw and the other way when I bat, but that never seemed to matter much, and maybe it makes my torso more balanced, I dunno.

What I do think I know about being left-handed is this - I've asked the experts for over thirty years, starting with college, and in general I get the same answer - when the Doctor's and researchers talk about brain development, or brain activity, they are always talking about righties, because righties are more prevalent, and lefties have not been studied. The Doctors are pretty sure that lefties are *not* just mirror images of righties as far as brain function goes, but that is about all I can get out of them.

My *guess*, based on the current state of neuroscience (luckily I live near the Mayo clinic and have heard talks given by some of the top experts) is that our brains function more like a cluster of processors instead of a single processor. I suspect that our brains can hold two or more impulses or processes or whatever you call it at the same time, and sometimes these processes may even contradict each other. That is my guess, and I think it explains why people's actions and thoughts are so darn complicated.

I also think that while different areas of the brain can develop to handle different functions, meaning it isn't like arithmetic processing must always be in a particular place, it is still true that _in general_ certain brain functions tend to happen in certain places. By the way, have you seen Jill Taylor's book "My Stroke of Insight?" It is awesome!

So what about lefties? I think that in general, in lefties, our brain's multiple processors are arranged differently from those in a righties brains, and some of the processors may even have a higher priority when contention occurs. Lefties are over-represented in the arts, for example. I think it is well-established that lefties are, in general, different from righties, and I'm gonna make the bold claim that we are better!

Yeah, I took the huge leap from different to better. Better at what, you should ask. Better at a certain kind of thinking and reasoning, I will reply. Certainly better at artistic reasoning, whatever that is.

I think it is well-established that there is a genetic link for handedness, because it tends to run in families. I think we will eventually discover exactly what that link is.

In the meantime, here in the privacy of my blog, I'm gonna make a bold claim and, again, state that in general lefties are the next step in human evolution as far as mental capacity goes. If this proves to be an evolutionary advantage, meaning will lefties get the chicks, well, I dunno for sure, but actors do tend to get around.

Whoa, the left-handed gene was discovered!!

2009-10-17T15:00:00.000-05:00

In a comment nepata pointed me to this article.

As I suspected, there is a genetic component to being left-handed, and they have found the gene that might cause it, although there may well be other genes or factors that play a part as well.

Do I have the greatest commenters or what?!

For the snarky among you the article does mention the gene and schizophrenia, which also seems to be linked with brain balance, but I remind you that the article also says left-handers should also not be worried about developing schizophrenia, because that illness is not completely understood yet, and there could be multiple factors that cause it. Also, right handers can get schizophrenia, so clearly there is more to it than just a person's handedness or this particular.

I acknowledge that sometimes I overstate the case for things, but the thing is that scientists are VERY careful in what they say, and they hate to speak prematurely. I, on the other hand, have no such constraints. I think scientists would agree that we are finding out much more data on how the brain develops and works, and it is seeming more and more possible that brain chemistry plays a big role in our behavior. My educated guess is that eventually we will find an organic cause for many of the neurosis, psychosis, and brain disorders that are currently listed in the DSM-IV psych manual.

For example, I think that I see much of the Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder (Different from OCD!) behaviors in the teabaggers and dittoheads. Google OCPD, read the description, and see if I am wrong. It sure explains a lot to me.

Legalizing Pot

2009-10-17T14:48:00.000-05:00

First I want to apologize for taking such a long break from blogging. I know that long hiatuses cause visitors to stop reading, and again I apologize for that. I needed to attend to some personal business, and those of you who know me know what that was.

My trip to CERN is still on, and I've been following the status from CERN by reading the CERN Courier. In addition there is a CERN bulletin that anyone can sign up for, and I am following that as well. The ring is progressing well, and almost all the sectors are at their operating temperatures. CERN is working very carefully this time, so I think that when I attend CERN they will absolutely have protons not only circulating in the injector ring, they will also have them in the main ring, and the beams should be colliding, although at lower speeds. They plan to ramp the speed up to 3.5 TeV by Christmas break. At that level they should get interesting results, but they plan to ultimately run the beam at double that, 7 TeV.

Enough of that. While mowing the lawn today I was mulling over stuff, and I got the following idea. I think that marijuana will eventually become legal in the US, and I think it will be the tobacco companies and their congressman that bring that about.

Let me say I have never tried pot, ever, and I am agnostic on the legalization argument, although at this time the arguments for legalization make the most sense to me. Essentially legalizing pot would allow the government to regulate and tax it and it would free up much needed prison space.

I got my idea because in my opinion, in the US at this time, it is the ultra-rich, the executives at major corporations, who actually have the real power in our society. I think this is fairly obvious. I do like to talk specifically about the people and not just the corporations, because if we get side tracked talking about corporations we lose the point. The point is that the ultra-rich people hide behind corporations and use them not only as camouflage but also as an excuse for their immoral behavior. Talking specifically about the executives themselves helps us focus on where the ultimate power lies, and hence where the ultimate solutions lie.

So to legalize pot you need a champion from the nobility, and it seems to me the tobacco company executives fit that role very nicely. If they were smart they would see that as tobacco becomes less prevalent in the US they need another revenue stream, and pot fits the bill very nicely. For one thing, it grows where tobacco grows, and those areas of the country already are used to making a living providing more or less banned substances - moonshine and then tobacco. Sure I know you can grow pot anywhere, but you *could* grow tobacco almost anywhere, at least indoors, and you *can* brew your own beer, and still the major corporations are able to have a very lucrative market in both of those. It is a matter of branding and marketing for the most part, along with some pricing and providing a consistent product quality.

Is this going to happen? Beats me, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least. In the same way that it took Nixon to go to China, I think it will take a Southern-based tobacco company to legalize pot. Yeah, I know, currently those same people have demonized pot, but the people who buy that argument could also be easily persuaded that 'pot is OK.' Critical thought and consistency are not their strong suit.

So what do you think? Am I full of it?

North Shore inline skate marathon

2009-09-21T19:15:00.000-05:00

Sorry for my absence. I've been a little busy with family stuff - notably the North Shore inline skate marathon here. The race is near Duluth MN, and it is the same course that is taken for the "Grandma's marathon."

No, I wasn't skating, but my wife and son both skated in the race and did great! The scenery along the north shore of Minnesota on Lake Superior is beautiful. The weather was perfect and I had a blast! Who knows, maybe next year I might participate, although I feel pretty shaky on rollerblades. The idea of falling on the pavement scares me a bit. I love ice skating, but I'm usually pretty padded and don't get scraped up if I fall.

I do plan on getting back to my blog. I finally received the book Entanglement, Information, and the Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics and the book looks excellent. Hopefully I can get to it soon. Because the book is pretty difficult, I might blog along the way. It might help me with understanding the book.

My little art project

2009-09-15T16:03:00.002-05:00

Self Portrait1
Originally uploaded by trippd11

If this goes correctly, this is a photo of my little art project. I call it "Self Portrait." Because it is shiny it doesn't really photograph well. The actual image is about 14" by 21". If you follow the link it shows a little better as a large image on flickr. There is a story about this image, but I think it is best to let art speak for itself.

Frigging Pawlenty!!

2009-09-12T11:30:00.001-05:00

I wanted this blog to mostly steer clear of politics, but doggone it what Pawlenty is doing is local for me and it really ticks me off!

A quick background - Pawlenty is the current governor of Minnesota, and he used to be a moderate Republican, which to me explains how he got to be the Governor of a moderate state, my state, Minnesota. I know that the rabid wacko right would claim Minnesota is a radical left-wing state, but Chuck you Farley, because Minnesota is actually moderate, and Minnesota only looks radical to you because you are so extremely right-wing.

One of the things I really really like about my state is that, for the most part, we have been pretty sensible and pragmatic about politics, we usually tend to go with what works in the long run, and we usually avoid scum and scandal and political corruption. For example, we used to have mandatory exhaust testing, but after a couple years we realized the vast majority of the cars were passing the test, so we stopped the testing. We could restart it again if we needed it. To me this showed that our government bureaucracy did not automatically grow out of control.

But Pawlenty is now a special case, because he has declared that he will NOT be seeking re-election here, and he has begun trying to woo the national Republican powers so he can run for the Presidency as a Republican in 2012. Ironically he has some pretty good national likeability stats because he has been pretty moderate to date but now he has to become radical to get the Republican nomination so now he is caught in a tough spot. He has to try to play it both ways.

But that is his fault, and I give him no pity. Indeed, this past week Pawlenty has pissed me off big time.

First he goes mouthing off about Governors using the 10th amendment to keep their states from adopting any new health plan the US government adopts, and then he flew to Virginia and stumped for the loony Bob McDonnel who is seeking the governorship of Virginia.

Bob McDonnell wrote his college thesis in 1989 stating that "working women and feminists were a detriment to traditional families." The thesis also argued that "government has a right to discriminate against 'cohabitors, homosexuals and fornicators' to protect heterosexual, two-parent families. "

Of course now Bobby is trying to backpedal and soften his image to get elected, but like Pawlenty he is trying to play things both ways.

I've got two statements to make. The first is to Bob McDonnell:

From an immoral but practical standpoint I suppose it seems okay to discriminate against homosexuals, because there really aren't that many of them, but if you discriminate against cohabitors and fornicators you'll be lucky if there are 10% of the people left over to vote for you.

To Tim Pawlenty:

How dare you do this while collecting pay from Minnesota taxpayers?! Either shut up or stop your freeloading and follow Palin's lead. Resign from the Minnesota Governorship!

Speaking of Palin, can you imagine Palin as President, Pawlenty as Vice President, and Michelle Bachman as speaker of the house?! Oh, baby, would that be something to see, and I don't mean in the good way.

Yikes!

My History

2009-09-10T01:01:00.000-05:00

I have been told that I tend to be overly verbose, so I'll try to make this as concise as I can.

I am a left-handed male, first born ENTJ Virgo, born in the year of the Monkey. I was born on a Saturday, which means I am a Saturday's child who will work hard for a living. Chemistry.com says I am a director-explorer. I come from mostly German/Polish peasant stock, which I suppose means one half of me wants to invade the other half. Besides the German-Polish I am also part English and Irish and one-fourth who knows, so I am pretty much a Northern European mongrel. National Geographic tells me my people emigrated from Africa up through the Middle East into central Asia, then over to Europe. I used to think we came through the Middle East straight to Europe, but it turns out I was wrong.

I think these words form a very good, concise description of me. What do they mean? Hey, I'm not going to do all your work for you! You are on the net - the best research tool in the history of the world - go find out for yourself! If you can't bother to do that then I suppose you'll have to read all my verbose words to come.

I have played (American tackle) football, which I loved dearly, and I currently put the shot and throw the discus and javelin. This fits my broad shoulders, relatively short legs, and fast-twitch muscles. No, I'm not a dwarf! I'm a 6'1" mesomorph who struggles with keeping my body fat down to a healthy level.

If IQ measurements matter for you, mine is high, but I have found that intelligence is mostly a curse instead of a blessing. I have passed this curse down to my children. I'm sorry for that. I am happily, faithfully married for over 26 years to a wonderful woman who shares few of my traits and yet is strong enough, and patient enough, to put up with my quirks. Because of her I have a beautiful house and we have four great children, spanning the ages from twelve to twenty two. We have done our best to help them get started in life, despite the curse of intelligence that we seem to have given them.

I was somewhat of a child prodigy, but not in the overt bad way, like being pushed into things before I was ready, but in the covert bad way, meaning I was seen to have had 'potential' and I have spent much of my life trying to reach my potential. People expected great things from me, and I expected great things from me too.

So what have I done, actually? I did the college thing, then I did the corporate thing, and I stuck with the corporate thing, and I stayed with the corporate thing to pay the bills , and I learned much about the corporate thing that I didn't like but stuck it out, and finally the corporate thing threw me out. I suppose I am proud that I avoided my layoff as long as I did, and I stuck with an incredibly bad situation right through to the end. Yeah, that wasn't easy to do, and I had bills to pay, a lot of bills, what with supporting five other people and four college educations, and I had promises to keep and miles to go before my sleep.

So much of the bills are paid, but many are not yet paid, and I have been cast out by corporate America, cast out by IBM, who said "you'll start slow, with low pay and few benefits, but if you stick with us, trust us, in the long run it will be worth it, with a pension and prestige and at the end you'll be able to do all those things you ever wanted us to do." Yes, I traded my potential fortune for security, and in the end I am left with no fortune and no security. IBM changed the rules in the middle of the game, and they are not even decent enough to admit they did it.

But I do not want to get into that here. Maybe later, in the greater context of my views on the world at large and how things are. Despite what has happened to me I am still better off than many many people, and I am blessed with many fortunate things, and bitterness and anger, while very real emotions, will not serve me well in the future. I will simply say that corporations are, by design, immoral and non-sensible creations that can take on a life of their own, a life which has tremendous power but which lacks all the good attributes that humanity is capable of having.

And look at that, I was not concise at all. Yeah, I can certainly ramble on about things. If you have suffered this far then I give credit to you, my dear reader, and I am afraid all I can promise is more such suffering from my verbiage in the future.

Did I write these posts in the future?!

2008-12-31T00:58:00.001-06:00

No, I did not discover some quantum wormhole that allows me to post from the future.

Because some of these posts read best in a certain order, and I could not find any easy way to have this blogger tool show posts in "oldest first" order, I've had to hack the dates of my posts to make them appear in the order I would like to have them appear. So pretty much ignore the post dates. Sorry about that.

Tripp, WTF??!!!

2008-12-30T11:33:00.000-06:00

Yup, that was my wife's reaction to telling her about my planned trip to CERN. It was a bombshell, for sure, and she actually handled it very well, and she certainly did not use explicit language, and I am grateful for all of that. I really am. And I know she doesn't like to hear my 'explanations,' which to her are rationalizations, and I love the fact that I have her to point that out to me, to keep me grounded, but I need to give an explanation, which might be a rationalization, and if you don't know the difference go ahead and google it. Seriously, if you haven't figured out that the internet, the web, google, is the biggest baddest bestest encyclopedia you have ever seen then you just simply do NOT want to learn. And that is okay, do your own thing, as my hippie-self would say. But if for some odd reason, perhaps curiosity, which is innate in most of us and will probably be found to be one of the basic emotions in our brain and will have an actual cluster of neurons associated with it, but I'm rambling, if for some reason you want to hear my explanation then read on.

I'm setting the ground rules here, kinda copying from John Scalzi, who is an excellent sci fi writer and who has the whatever blog (I think he still has it) and I'll admit right from the start I prefer to learn from the best and I doubt anything I do is original and everything here is simply a retread from the geniuses before me so accuse me of being a copycat or whatever, I don't care. I'm mostly copying from the *best*, and John Scalzi is one of the best.

The thing is this is *my* blog and at the moment I am allowing public comment but I will turn that off if I need to, either for spam (does it really account for 70% of all internet traffic??) or for any reason whatsoever so put that in your pipe and smoke it! And don't even try the free speech thing on me, youngster, because I was all over it when you were doing poo poo in your didees and I don't put up with willful ignorance. Not here. I'm gonna call stupid stupid and ignorant ignorant and if you don't like it take a hike son, take a hike.

Back to the topic - why CERN, why the large hadron particle accelerator?!

I'm not totally sure. I don't believe in destiny, I believe in reality. I believe very much in reality. And yet particle physics has always been a passion of mine. I want to know the complete nature of reality. It is an itch that I simply must scratch. I have always had it, and I used to say that when I die if I get to meet God and if I get one question I'll ask "What is the complete nature of reality?"

Yeah, I used to say that, but I don't anymore. Why not? Because I was fortunate enough to briefly share an office for a few months with an incredibly brilliant new graduate from MIT and I told him my "question for God" story. Hey, it is an amusing story and it gets people to talk about themselves and you can find out the most interesting things when you get people talking about themselves. Not everyone, I suppose, but an MIT graduate?! You know that guy is going to be very interesting. Seriously, do you know how hard it is to get in to MIT?!   For me - it was the University of Illinois - with no questions asked because I lived in Illinois and our family had four children (did I say I was the oldest) and while my Dad had a good job, working for IBM (back when IBM was good to work for), we were not made of money and, as Tom Cruise playing Joel Goodman said in Risky Business - "U of I here I come!" If you don't know the movie you should. Great movie.

So I went to U of I, third in the nation in Engineering, woohoo!! (Behind MIT and CalTech). That is what we told each other when we were studying our butts off while those at Western Illinois were having all the good parties. Or so we thought. After college I found out *everybody* thought they came from the third best Engineering college in the nation. Nobody gave a crap that I came from the U of I. So what was all my hard work for? I'm not sure. Maybe it would have paid off if the market was tight for Engineers, but luckily when I graduated everybody and his brother was trying to hire engineers.   A lot of the work was working on weapons, but that is a story for another time.

Anyway, Gabby, (pronounced "Gobby," a nickname. Obviously) the brilliant young man from MIT said something nobody else said when I told my "question for God" story. He said "What if God answers "I dunno, I just did it. I'm God. I can do whatever I want. You're so smart you figure it out for yourself." I laughed at the time, because it was a clever response, and we were bored, passing time doing some stupid boring task to make some rich man richer, and we didn't want to get to the truly hard, boring work that would really make some rich man richer, so we had time to laugh. And we did. Gabby quit IBM after about six months. I told you he was smart.

But I stayed. Because I had obligations. And plenty of time to think. And Gabby's quip began to eat at me. And I saw that while my idea of asking God made for a funny story, and he had made it funnier, I might not actually get the chance to ask God that question, and even if I could, I might not get an answer. And even if I did get an answer, it might not be the answer I want. Which reminds me - do I believe in God? Yeah, pretty much. I'm spiritual. Let's get that out of the way right now. But that topic, dear reader, is for another time, and I could fill volumes on that topic.

But I digress once more. Why CERN? When I was in high school we took a field trip to the Fermilab in Batavia IL. I was lucky to live kinda close to it, and I was lucky to be good at sports so I could also be good at school and not get hazed, and I was lucky enough to listen to good advice from good people, so I went to FermiLab on a HS Physics class tour.   I also saw Armstrong walk on the moon when I was about twelve, and I drank that koolaid, long and deep. I drank that koolaid.

So science and exploration got ahold of me good and hard, and stuck with me while I lived life and made money and survived long enough to reproduce. And particle physics was nice enough to give me interesting questions without the answers, bless its heart. And those questions stayed with me.

So fast forward about thirty five years and here I am, some free time and the best research tool at my finger tips. So what would you do? I should mention that at work (and also at home too) the internet porn thing was out of the question. It gets boring, too. So I did not do what you would do, my secretive reader.

I studied. That is what I did. My main areas were politics and economics, mostly because at the time those were having the biggest impact on my life, and not in a good way. I pretty much figured those two topics out (there are some more topics for future posts), and then I got back into quantum mechanics and particle physics.

Well shoot, the whole time I had been making rich people richer and also having kids and raising them, helping my wife, there were whole battalions of other people, smart people, finding out some of the answers for me! And they were willing to tell me about it! I didn't have to read between the lines and interpolate and consider the underlying motives like you have to do when reading about politics or money.

No. They just came right out and told the truth as best they knew it, and were even willing to admit mistakes if proven wrong.

How refreshing. Really. It reminded me of why I had probably chosen science in the first place, although when I was a youth that was mostly done out of gut instinct.

But dammit this post has really gone on long enough. Now I'm gonna have to proofread it all and that is a big chore.

So why CERN, and why now?

Particle physics is incredibly interesting, and at this moment it is also incredibly topical. You think energy research is not important?! Do you know that CERN will hopefully be starting up again in November, knock on wood, and if so the physics world will be flooded with a deluge of brand new data? More on that later.

And yes, the internet is incredible for research but sometimes you just gotta be there. You gotta be there in person, if you get the chance. Watching the world on TV is OK, and playing a persona in a simulation can be very very compelling, but sometimes you simply must leave the Matrix.

Because reality is where it is at, dude. Reality is where it is at.

My CERN visit is ON!

2008-12-29T11:44:00.000-06:00

I have received confirmation from CERN that I will be joining an existing group for a tour of CERN. I am very excited about this! The group I will join is from Wellington College in the UK. I know little about this college, but I don't think that will matter much. I was very fortunate to be able to spend about six months in England years ago, doing work for IBM at the Hursley site, and overall that was one of the best experiences of my life. I was able to live, with my family, in a rented house. My daughter was accepted to start Kindergarten there, and I was very grateful that they allowed her to attend class at no fee. I loved living the regular day to day life with the people there, and it was probably the first time my eyes were opened to the fact that so much of what I KNEW in the US was either untrue, or taken for granted. My perspective on a lot of things changed greatly, and even though I came back to the US feeling like somewhat of a misfit I am very grateful to have had the opportunity of taking that trip. I must admit I owe IBM a great debt for giving me that opportunity.

But enough of that. No more looking back. I am going to look forward to my upcoming trip! I am not going to disclose the actual date of the trip, because of the internet and the security thing and all that, but I don't think that matters too much. In general the trip is in November and I will be preparing for it!

One thing I do know about the internet is that it can be a great place to get help from people, so if anyone has any travel tips for someone going to spend a week in Switzerland I am happy to hear them. I can get the weather info and directions and things like that from the web, but I am looking for any insider tips or where to eat in Geneva and any other places, besides CERN, that I absolutely must visit.

Reality and blowing your mind.

2008-12-28T12:20:00.000-06:00

OK, dear readers, it is time to freak out. Time to blow our minds. I'm gonna talk about Tripp and entanglement. Please note that I have bit the bullet and finally ordered some college texts on this subject, but they have not arrived yet, so I am going to be exposing my current ignorance here. At this time I am not speaking as an expert. I admit it. I'm just letting you see what happens in my noggin when I try to learn stuff.

Why should you care about this? I have no idea. If you don't, then skip on down, skip on down. If you stay, though, you'll hear about a really cool puzzle that just might blow your mind. I'm serious. And it is all legal, too. Safe for work as well. I promise.

Come with me to Tripp at age ten or so. I've picked up a layman's book about Einstein and relativity from my Grandpa, a guy who started out very humbly as one of about a dozen farmer kids who was so shy he ended up marrying one of about a dozen farmer kids when he was, like thirty-five and she was like twenty. My grandpa led a very quiet, shy, humble life, and never got to college. I don't even know if he finished high school. Looking back I have no idea how he got that book on relativity, but he did have it, and he gave it to me to read, and that book was perfect for me. I think my Grandpa was a REALLY smart dude who never reached his potential. That book explained, in layman's terms, what was going on in Physics from around 1900 to 1930 or so and what Einstein had done with his theories of General and Special Relativity. That book stopped before quantum mechanics, but that was OK, because it did a great job of filling the gap from Newton through Einstein to Quantum Mechanics.

As an aside, I have started to think that how we teach modern physics might be kinda wacked. It is interesting to get the historical perspectives, and it does follow a logical path, except it also requires the student to learn a subject and then unlearn at least parts of it to learn the next step, because that is what has happened with Physics - there is a breakthrough in understanding and the geniuses explore that and learn tons about it but then reach a dead end, and it seems as if all of them need to die off before another breakthrough happens, usually from someone who is not encumbered with all the traditional thinking.

Maybe I am full of it, I dunno, but it seems like there is some of that going on. At the same time there is also unchanging reality, so there is an absolutely objective external reality upon which every experiment and every theory and every hypothesis can be measured. Thank God. Seriously. Because unlike the endless debates that can happen with subjective things like religion, morals, people, politics, societies, etc, in physics there really is one absolute standard for what reality is. Reality is that standard.

And yes, I take that as a matter of faith, I can't prove it, and I don't want to get into that debate at this time, although it would be a really good topic for another post.

So reality - can you dig it? Reality is absolute truth. Can you appreciate how great that is? I do. It is so refreshing to have an ultimate arbiter. Reality is NOT a matter of opinion, and I thank God that there is an absolute reality. I think this is a wonderful blessing that, in my opinion, too few people notice and appreciate.

Let's put aside that stuff for a minute, put aside the past and seeing how we got here, and I'm asking you, for the next few minutes, to just trust me, knowing that I am giving an imperfect explanation of things that are still very cool and I would dearly love to hear corrected or clarified. My quest, actually, is to correct my understanding of quantum physics, so I greatly appreciate any input on this topic. But I think I will end this post and cut to the chase in the next one.

Things you think you know but you are wrong

2008-12-27T16:19:00.000-06:00

If you are going to come along with me then you are going to have to accept the fact that there are things you think you know, assumptions that make sense for you and which have worked in your life, but assumptions that are just plain wrong.

I want to take a little time giving an example of common assumptions about reality that are useful but completely wrong. And yeah, for those who have taken notice of certain cultish religions this does sound a little like a pitch for them, but I promise that is not what this is. I am not talking about spiritual things here, I am talking about cold hard reality.

I assume you have all seen optical illusions, and you all accept the fact that sometimes, in some situations, what you think you see is not actually what is there. As scientists are finding out more and more about how our brain does visual processing, they are starting to find out some interesting things. For example, you all know about our blind spot and how it works. You've probably seen demonstrations of your blind spot. I learned about it back in high school. What I did *not* know until recently, though, is that our brains actually 'fill in' the blind spot with what we see around the blind spot. I think this even applies to an edge that we see going through the blind spot. We will see an unbroken line going through the blind spot. Our brain fills in the blank and we see what may not, actually, be there.

Moving on from our blind spot, let us go on to the act of throwing and catching a ball. When I was younger I greatly enjoyed playing baseball, and I still love coaching and playing softball. When I throw a baseball I look at the receiver's glove and I try to throw the ball straight to the glove. If I am really good I can come pretty close. A major league pitcher may have "pin-point" accuracy, meaning they can throw to an area maybe a foot wide in each direction.

Did you notice what I said though? I used 'they' as the third person singular pronoun for indeterminate gender when I should have used 'he/she'. That usage of 'they' used to really bother me, and it is still an incorrect usage, but I have almost totally given in to the current usage. I know why the usage is changing, we used to use 'he' but that assumes too much and we simply do NOT have a good word to use for the third person singular pronoun, and I also know that good writers should write around the problem, but those people are dying off, and I concede to the change, even though it is simply incorrect.

But what I really meant with my questions is did you notice that I said I throw the ball _straight_ to the glove, but clearly that is not the path the ball takes. The ball takes an arc, pretty much a parabola, rising up and then dropping down. In addition, good pitchers can curve the ball even more, and plenty of batters have swung as best they can at where they think the ball is and have missed the ball, so obviously they did not really know where the ball was.

Even if all we know is that the ball starts at my hand and eventually hits the catcher's mitt, we still think we know the path the ball takes. Maybe we use the wrong word like "straight" but we know, in our gut, that a baseball leaving my hand must have followed an arc to get to the catcher's mitt. If we watch from first or third base we can see the arc of the ball without much trouble. But think about that. For us to know that the ball travels an arc we have to see it along the way. If we had a screen up hiding the flight of the ball, and if all we could see was the pitcher releasing the ball and then the catcher catching it, we would assume that the ball traveled the arc because we have seen that a million times, and maybe we have even measured the force of gravity and we can predict, with great accuracy, where the ball is even if we do not see it. So even when we cannot actually see every single position of the ball along the way, we know the path of the ball. We know it so well we have the science of ballistics and aeronautics and we can predict with extreme accuracy the path of a projectile and the orbit of a satellite. Up here, at the macro level, we 'know' stuff even when we don't really observe it. We make assumptions, and a lot of times we make assumptions without even knowing it, and that usually works out pretty well for us, although that is a topic big enough for another post.

Moving on to the quantum level though, where the moving objects are extremely tiny, a lot of our assumptions are just plain wrong, and that is pretty cool, because it gives us a puzzle with an absolute answer as well. It gives us an interesting problem to think about, a puzzle that has an objective answer, and that is worth a fortune.

At the quantum level there are only a couple ways and times when we can 'see' an object. There are ways to do it, take my word for it, but unlike big things like a baseball at the quantum level we pretty much can only get brief glimpses of quantum things with a lot of blind spots in between.

The quantum phenomena that really got my attention back in my youth was an experiment that can be done with photons. Photons are one of the basic objects way down at the quantum level, and for right now as a simplification let's just talk about the photons that are the smallest bit of visible light. Some of the things that can happen to these photons are creation, movement, interaction with other quantum objects, and destruction. From way up here at the macro level, studying optics, we know that light more or less goes in a straight line, it can be reflected, it can be refracted, and it can be absorbed by matter. We know other stuff about it too, a lot, but forget about that for now.

Here is the experiment: Say you have a light source and you shine it onto a semi-silvered mirror. By that I mean a piece of glass that has a partial mirror surface on it, like the 'two way' mirrors they use in stores to observe people to make sure they are not stealing. Assume that the mirror lets half the light through and the mirror reflects the other half. Assume we angle the mirror so that some of the light is reflected and the rest of the light is refracted through the glass. By the way, this is a real experiment that really has been done zillions of times.

So far I admit this is rather boring, but stick with me. What if use semi-silvered mirrors to split the light beam into two parts which each take separate paths but then the separate beams get recombined later by using another semi-silvered mirror?

How can we do this? We take the reflected beam of light, the part that reflected off the semi-silvered mirror, and we reflect that beam again with full mirrors a couple times so that it goes out and then back in again and it gets combined with the original beam by using another semi-silvered mirror. I can't draw the diagram for this, but the light that is reflected by the first semi-silvered mirror takes a left, then a right, goes parallel to the original beam, and then takes another right, then into a final semi-silvered mirror where it is reflected and re-joins the original beam. The part of the original beam that is refracted through the first semi-silvered mirror goes straight for a distance and then through another angled semi-silvered mirror, where it combines with the detoured beam. Think of the light as a marching band going down a street, then some of the band takes a detour to the left for a block, turns right and goes down a parallel street for a couple blocks, and then turns right and then left again to join the rest of the band that had walked straight and never turned.

One of the interesting aspect to light is that, since 1909 or so, it was known that while light moved and bounced like a stream of tiny particles, it also had some wave-like properties. Specifically when light passes through a slit in a barrier the light that comes through on the other sides shows interference patterns. These interference patterns happen when waves interact, and viola (yeah, I know, puns and all that), light flies like an arrow and bounces like a ball and has interference patterns like a wave. For a long time, even up to the time when I was born in the 1950s, there was a debate about whether light was a wave or a particle. (As an aside, it is good to know that a 'false dilemma' is a classic logical fallacy. Keep your eyes open for them.) The debate is now over. The 'particle or wave' thing is a false dilemma. Photons are neither, they are a localized waveform that has the properties of both a wave and a particle. How stupid were we to think light had to be either a wave or a particle? We were like the Greeks saying "Earth Air Water and Fire." But I digress. Back to our experiment.

We split the light, then recombine it, and then pass it through a slit, and we see interference patterns just as if the light had not actually been split at all. Well, you say, what is the big deal? And you are right, it is not really a big deal - we have shown that photons can interact with each other to form interference patterns. We already knew that. And also, did you notice the two ways a photon could escape from our experiment? I forgot to mention that, but those paths don't really matter.

The mind blowing thing is this. What if we change the photon generator in our experiment in such a way that it sends out not a gazzilion photons in a beam, but a single photon at a time. Can we do that?! Oh yeah, we can do that. People have done this.

Let us follow a single photon instead of a beam of photons. We are able to detect when a single photon is created and emitted. Can we tell if it is reflected or refracted through the first semi-silvered mirror? Oh yeah, we can do that, by placing detectors in each of the paths, and when we do that we will see that the photon is either detected on the reflection path or on the refracted path through the first mirror, one path or the other. Trust me. The photon is detected either on one path or on the other, and never on both paths at the same time. This experiment has been done a zillion times, but so what, this is about as interesting as flipping a coin and seeing that half the times it is heads and half the time it is tails, and never both at once. Exactly so. This is boring, but what is not boring is the fact that if we remove the detectors and let the photon pass all the way through the slit at the end, taking only one path or the other but never both guess what? We will see an interference pattern at the end.

No lie.

A single photon takes one of two paths, paths which for all I know could be very long paths and of differing lengths, and yet when that photon goes through the final slit it will show an interference pattern.

Go ahead, say it - WTF?!! Interference patterns are caused by photons interacting with each other. Also, there is no such thing as half a photon. There just isn't. Quantum means no halfsies any more. Things are divided this far and no further.

This is pretty much what I learned back in the Seventies. I'm pretty sure that is all we knew back then, or at least it was all I could get in a college level text book at the undergraduate level. Keep in mind this was pre-internet, and at the time I was looking at some other really cool things that could make me money, so at the time I didn't really dive very deeply into this.

This is one of the questions which I set aside and which gnawed at me off and on for over thirty years. I'm pretty sure I know we now have an answer for this, and I'm pretty sure I know what the answer is,
but I need to save that for another post.

Can anyone else see why this is such a great puzzle to work on?

Entanglement, Information, and the Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics

2008-12-26T15:29:00.000-06:00

Time to get down to business. Every day life has kept me a little busy but no more excuses. I have found an excellent book, Entanglement Information and the Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. I have tried three other books, sort of "Quantum Mechanics for Dummies," and they were all pretty disappointing. But it seems to me that the book "Entanglement Information and the Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics" will not disappoint. Granted the book is expensive, nearly $90, but so far it is worth it.

The author of the book, Gregg Jaeger, was a triple major in mathematics, philosophy, and physics at the U of W at Madison! My eldest recently graduated from Madison and I have great respect for that Institution. Granted it is no University of Illinois, my alma mater, but Wisconsin had reciprocity with Minnesota, and it is hard to argue with that.

Gregg Jaeger earned a doctorate at Boston University, and currently hold a professorship there, so the guy knows his stuff. Also, the book is current, having a copyright of 2009.

The book is dense, so I'm going to try to blog my way through it, starting with my next post.

Why care about this?

2008-12-26T14:24:00.000-06:00

Already a couple people have emailed me and essentially asked why anyone should care about this.

In general I think that people are free to care about whatever they want, and I think I have made the origins for my personal interest on this topic pretty clear.

But the question is still a good question, and I must admit that I think to some degree _everyone_ should care about quantum physics, although in no way do I think people should be compelled to care about it.

So why do I think _you_ personally should care about quantum physics? Yes, I mean you - the person reading this right now. Before I tell you that I want to tell you a little more about my background.

For the past ten years or so I have been a Java programmer for IBM. For those of you that don't know, the Java programming language is important in a couple ways. The main way, at least as I see it, is Java gives programmers the ability to really reuse, and extend, programming work that other people have already done. Java programmers do not have to "reinvent the wheel." This has allowed a whole list of things to happen - for one thing new Java functions and programs are written in a fraction of the time that it used to take, because the programmers don't have to redo everything. That explains why the introduction of new programs has pretty much exploded in the past ten years, and it is one of the reasons even the open source programing stuff has been able to get so big and so powerful and so full of features.

During the past ten years my personal job changed from writing new java programs to just porting existing programs to a new platform. The porting idea is that a relatively small group of programmers can produce big, great programs and then a few more of us would 'port' these programs to different servers, saving money. The idea makes good business sense because it allows all of us to be more productive.

In theory, porting the program should mean running it on the new server platform and watching everything working great with no changes. The theory is that Java is "write once, run anywhere."

In practice, though, while we are getting closer to that ideal, we are not there yet. Many times when I ran a java program on a new server platform something would not work. That was the main reason I was paid to port the program, my job was to find those failures and make sure they got fixed.

In many ways those java programs were like icebergs, where the part above water is the statements that are in the source code, and the huge amount below water is all the statements and methods and programs that were already written to support the new stuff. The new programmer could be very productive because he/she didn't have to re-write or even worry about all the underwater stuff.

But sometimes he/she did have to worry, because sometimes, when I tried to run the new stuff on a new server, somewhere, below the surface, the dang iceberg was hitting a snag and sinking the Titanic. I gotta tell you, to0, that because these java 'icebergs' were constantly being added to on the surface, they were getting to be HUGE, like huge enough to sink the Titanic, and big enough that they had to be shipped on multiple DVDs.

Trying to trace down and find where, underwater, the collision was happening was much worse than finding the gouge in the side of the Titanic. There were literally thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of places that failure could be. Granted I didn't need to examine by hand thousands of places one after the other, but I still needed to peel the onion, one layer at a time, to get to the origination of the problem. Sometimes there could be over a hundred layers of the onion to dig through.

My point is that, like java programs, reality is also 'layered,' with one level resting on the one below it, and like java programs, usually it is just fine for us to not worry about the stuff underneath, because the surface is working just fine and we know most everything about it.

Yet sometimes, in rare occasions, what happens below the surface matters a lot to what happens up here. Much of our history of physical science, and everything that rests on that, like chemistry and mechanics and computer chips and optics and a whole lot of other things, has been the process of looking below the surface and understanding what is happening down there.

So why should 'we' care about quantum physics? Because down there, in certain limited but very important ways, what happens _does_ affect all of the physical reality we have at the macro level. There is a good chance that some very rare cases, something we don't really know about yet, could have a very big and very beneficial effect on our daily lives. Think of what our understanding of electricity has done for us. Think of what our understanding of chemistry has done for us.

That's why I think we should care about this.

I'm here!

2008-12-25T03:18:00.000-06:00

Hey, guess what? I'm here, in Geneva, Geneve, CH, within, I believe, a couple miles of the CERN ring. Hold on a sec - yup, I could just feel a proton or two whizzing by at relativistic speeds. It felt like it made it more than half the way around or so, but I'll find out more tomorrow. Today is tourist day.

Did you notice I got here on Xmas day?! How cool is that? I suppose technically I arrived yesterday, but I was so beat I hardly remember it. Let me give my impressions.

I stopped overnight in Toronto, which normally I love, but between 10 PM arrival and a next day afternoon departure there wasn't time to see much. Nothing at all, really. Oh, except the Hertz car had GPS for no extra cost! Talk about a blessing. Pretty much, although I heard "computing new route" so many times I was sick of it. And if you ever get off the 12-lane highway in Toronto by accident it is a REAL pain to get nagged back onto it. Oh, and after arriving and while trying to find the rental counter in the Toronto airport I met, I kid you not, three other groups of people (a couple, and two other guys) lost just like me, looking for the rental counters! We grumbled briefly together, then set off in all directions. I mean really, who in the world sticks the rental counters in the middle of the car park on the bottom floor??

Oh, and why oh why did I think splitting my load among two bags and a carry-on would somehow be easier?! My carry on was the heaviest of all, because I had my laptop PLUS power supply PLUS Thoreau in it. I tell you what, that Thoreau guy wrote sentences that are heavier than some essays from other guys. And if my High School English teacher Mrs. Griese (no, not the football player. Or his wife.) ever saw his run-on sentences she would red check his butt toot suite! Hey, do you think Thoreau got his writing style from me? Am I Thoreau, traveling back in time? If so, I think I will take note that silver colored minnows do not actually get their pigment from silver. Or wait, maybe I better check on that first to be sure.

I was so pumped to be traveling that I refused the porters and little trolly cars and hefted my own three bags, pretending it was nothing, a trifle, a mosquito for such a manly traveler as I (was), and strode with shoulders back and chest out.

Then I found out that the flight actually stopped in Montreal before going to Geneva, and we ALL had to get off, get our luggage, and get back on again, and the cutie pattooty stewardess I had been chatting up in preparation for the long flight to Geneva got off in Montreal!! So I walked, got my bags, then dragged them back through security, then slumped down by the gate. It was maybe eight at night and the terminal was DEAD and we all looked very tired. And then when I got into my seat on the plane it was an aisle seat (shoulders) near the bulkhead, which normally I like, but I forgot that families with small children sit near the bulkhead, so I was torn. I was next to a single woman, and I like that, because it gives me shoulder room, but there were two fussy toddlers. What to do, what to do? There were plenty of open seats on the plane so I moved back to the middle, which was nice, because I could sort of lay out and sleep across the three seats, sort of.

Geneva airport was a BREEZE. Customs and immigration nothing but a wave of the hand. This was good because I had run out of steam, big time. I got to the hotel at about 10:30 AM and thank God my room was ready. I was feeling ill and run down. The steak dinner I had on the plane (very nice actually) was still sitting in my stomach, so the calories refused to get into my system, and I was NOT hungry. I was car sick a bit, and I think I lost five pounds of water weight. I am pretty sure I did, because someday I will tell you how I lost ten pounds of water weight in one day, and got paid for it, too!! Under a Dr's care, for a study.

Well I crashed from about noon until midnight, up a couple hours, crashed again, and this morning I am feeling almost 100%. I drank a lot of water and I splurged on the minibar chocolate. Lemme tell you, that chocolate was PERFECT! You know what they say about Swiss chocolate don't you? "Temp a woman with that and you are nearly half way there." I know. I KNOW! It is good for recuperation, too. I also had a nice breakfast this morning and the breakfast is sitting well, so I think my calorie burning machine is back up and running.

I have a ton more to say about just my hotel but it is now 10:17 on a Swiss morning and I need to get a mass transit pass, some supplies for the room, and then either go downtown to walk around, or maybe go to this museum I've read up on.

So aue reservoir, as the Swiss say. Switzerland is Europe's water tower!

Did the world end and I didn't notice it?

2008-12-24T14:51:00.000-06:00

I'm pretty sure the world has not ended yet, but unfortunately I can explain why that is so.

CERN scientists are being incredibly cautious bringing the ring up this time. Last week the status was that the ring was half-tested, meaning the protons had been extracted from hydrogen, accelerated by a linear accelerator (LINAC2), shaped by the PS Booster, then go into the Proton Synchrotron (PS), followed by the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), before finally reaching the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and going half way around. When this thing finally gets all fired up the protons will circulate in the LHC for 20 minutes before reaching their maximum speed and energy.

The synchrotrons mentioned above are rings, and the Super Proton Synchroton was started in 1976, halfway through my college studies. Each one of these devices has been a workhorse for experiments, and new discoveries were found when using every single one of them. In addition, the beauty of CERN is that the design is open-ended, with every stage leading into the next stage - they built what they could, built useful tools, used them, and then added on to them for the next stage. This last stage, the Large Hadron Collider, is the first stage at CERN that uses superconducting magnets. That has helped them achieve much higher energies.

At least in theory. In practice the doggone thing is not yet fully operational, and they expect half-speed collisions before Christmas but not before. I had to guess about when to come here when I was planning this trip. I had to guess when the final ring traversal would be made, and when the first collisions would happen, and doggone it but they are only about 90% there, and no farther at this time. They use the weekends to try the full functional runs, then work like crazy during the week to get everything in order for the next run.

Whew.

Because of the US holidays my travel was the best, and cheapest, this week. I really wish I could have been here for the first actual collision though.

Oh well.

I found out many interesting things while here, even though the world did not end. I'll try to share them here.

The scientists in the control rooms are so YOUNG. How must it be for them, to be so young and to have such a huge future ahead of you? They are so fortunate!! I found out that the beams - they will start with protons - are very carefully shaped. They are clustered into packets, with short gaps between packets, so that they travel similar to cars in a train. Because the protons all have the same positive charge they repel each other, so they must be focused and clustered together by special magnets. In addition, each channel in the tube (there are two channels, one for each direction) can have four beams at the same time! I did not know this! In that way the beams can be different - different energies, and even different materials. They have plans to use lead ions in some of the beams! Wow.

The physical size of the thing is staggering. The ring itself just less that 27,000 meters in diameter. It is 100 meters underground, for a couple reasons. First, it rests on bedrock, and if the bedrock was at 50 meters they would have built it only 50 meters down. Second, they did not want to disrupt the countryside. I am glad that money is not king in every part of the world. I think the ground helps with insulation against the elements, although that could be done above ground, even for the super conducting magnets.

Speaking of magnets, they have four different sets of magnets running. The first set curves the beam into a circle. The second set compress or focuses the beams. The third set fine tunes the aiming of the beams to a precise X,Y location. The fourth set accelerates the beams, and it will take about twenty minutes to get the beam to full speed, 7 TeV.

Wait, I think there must be a fifth set of magnets, because to force a collision, once two beams are ready to go, whirling around in opposite directions, they use magnets to push a few of the packets (train cars) into each other to collide.

This is not as easy as it may sound. The timing is very critical, so the collision happens in one of the four pre-set detector areas - Atlas, CMS, Alice, or LHCb. Also, the beams are VERY narrow, and even then there is a large amount of empty space between the protons.

Speaking of empty space, the air is evacuated from the entire ring, including the detector chambers. The vacuum is ten times greater than the vacuum on the moon. That is so the protons do not collide with atoms or gas molecules.

And speaking of empty space, I think I hard my guide say something like empty space repels itself? I need to follow-up on that, I knew that on the quantum level photons are created and annihilated all the time, and if you put two metal plates near each other the photons created between them will have lower energy, so the plates tend to get pushed together, but I have never heard about the empty space repelling itself thing.

The other mind blowing thing I heard from my guide is that some interpretations of the Heisenberg equations suggest perhaps there is an underlying fabric to space-time, and the interaction of matter with the fabric manifests itself as what we call mass? I need to check on that, too. I know they are hoping to find the Higgs boson, the so-called God Particle, the particle that gives the property of mass and transfers the force of gravity.

I think. Dang it all. I really wish I was smart enough to understand all this. It is very frustrating to be curious and to not understand all the possible answers, but perhaps it is also a blessing to have such a puzzle to ponder on?

Some of the engineering challenges were staggering, too, but I must leave those for another post.