Intersectionalist Philatelist

What is one to do if one has a beloved (but neglected) stamp collection and one is a lover of Star Wars but one does not send much snail mail any longer?

I wonder...

Meta meme

I had asthma as a child so I avoided running.  As an adult, I have been known to run a 5K every now and then, but my major goal has always been to simply finish.  A recent purchase of a treadmill has inspired me to try hit a 5K in 30 mins or less.  Today I hit that goal (I hear you laughing, YL - remember I told you to reach out to me when you are 50 or 51 and then we'll talk!).

Every time I hit the treadmill (at first because it was winter-time in New England and now because the pollen count is out of control), I have the same images pop into my head.  Every single time.

One is this scene from Gattaca:  

The other is the opening montage from the Six Million Dollar Man:

It occurs to me that almost everything I do has a meta-memory associated with it (even a simple stretch begets recollections of associated memories).  Either an old memory of my own or something from a movie or a book or something... Reminds me of the flashbacks to older black and white movies embedded within Mon Oncle d'Amerique which I always think of as informing the hero what it means to be manly.  When I think on this movie's influence on me, I'm also bringing up the influences on that movie, right?

Maybe these cultural touchstones speak to me because they are manifestations of some kind of universal psyche.

                                                -or- 

Maybe I am simply a collection of memes accumulated over my lifetime

                                                  ?

Time, Free Will, and Death

(A) If you think about four dimensional space-time a lot, it will change your perspective on things.  It certainly affected the man who arguably spent the most time thinking about it, Herr Albert Einstein. 

(B) Lately, AP and I have been talking a lot about free will and determinism.  

(C) I once read that if you think about life as a process with birth and death marking the beginning and end points rather than thinking about life as a state function (where life is a '1' and death is a '0' I suppose) then it is much easier to deal with the death of a loved one or to contemplate one's own death.

(A+B+C) Imagine, if you will, the dimension of time as a visible dimension like heading West on a map.  Imagine yourself having a high altitude above such a map such that you can look both East (back in time) and West (forward in time).  Your life would be some kind of line segment embedded in this terrain.  The thing is, the line was always there and will always be there.  In this vision of time there may be no free will but it is hard to argue that your life didn't matter either.  Einstein apparently had this kind of vision of time and weighed in on free will as being illusory.  

    Sometimes I have dreams about flying.  Sometimes I have dreams about an out-of-body experience.  But my favorite dreams of all are when I am flying out and over time itself: I am moving over a huge rolling map that began somewhere far to the East with the Big Bang and ends impossible far to the West with the Heat Death of the Universe.  There's so much real-estate beneath me, but I never manage to fly too far from my own world line before I wake up from that place beyond space and time.

Authority-Driven or Data-Driven?

 "Because I said so"

"That's just the way we do things around here"

"He's the boss - so..."

Always disliked those expressions.  I was brought up to be more suspicious than trusting of those in authority positions.  Better to follow where the data leads you than where a 'leader' take you...  That's why studying science always pays dividends no matter what walk of life you eventually find yourself in.

When observing people, I am dismayed by how frequently the argument that simply sounds good or feels right will win.  In physics, I was trained to be suspicious of your intuition and look for confirmation from the experiments and the actual facts.

Years ago a friend of Irene's from MIT was visiting while he was in medical school.  We asked him how he liked it and he said that while he was excited to enter the profession, the education he was receiving wasn't all that great.  "They are just teaching us how to pattern match and to make associations - they are not teaching us how to think like my engineering & science courses did at MIT."  Interesting distinction, huh?

My buddy Erec recently forwarded a fascinating article:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/

In it, a historical detective story plays out in which the who-dunnit is the (formerly) commonly accepted standard in the medical community that only particles smaller than 5 microns qualify as airborne.  (hence, droplets containing COVID-19 were, for so long, misidentified by the WHO as not being airborne).  The jarring collision between scientists that study airborne particles in general (who knew the 5 micron cut-off for being airborne was overly low) and the medical community that accepted the handed down cut off of 5 microns sets off the chase.  Long story short, the atmospheric scientists who were data-driven were correct (as we all now know) but the medically trained professionals were slow to pivot away from their 'accepted' cut off value of 5 microns.  Follow the data, people!

 

(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_curve )

This whole thing remind me of Lakoff's family-as-a-metaphor-for-government argument:  Conservatives think families should be authority driven whereas liberals believe in the nurturing parent model.  Hence their preferred style of governing. 

I prefer my families nurturing, my governments liberal, and my facts served with a side of data; thank you very much.

 

Chains that Bind, Fashion, and Existentialism

Recently I was reminded of a 'trick' I used to perform as a newly minted teenager in the 80's.  I had these shirts that I had outgrown but really loved so I kept wearing them.  They were button-downs but they were fastened with snap buttons.  I discovered that I could actually unsnap a few of them just by dramatically expanding my chest.  

At the time, I don't think I was consciously thinking about the Incredible Hulk or He-Man or even Clark Kent turning into Superman; It was just a funny and fun thing to do until I couldn't even wear those shirts anymore.  In retrospect now, I am sure that was part of the appeal though.  My secret identity was finally being revealed:  under than awkward nerdy exterior, an even more awkward and even nerdier guy was busting out!

One of my all time favorite movies is La Strada. Something about the way Anthony Quinn goes from confidently breaking those chains around his chest in the beginning of the movie to the way he struggles to break them in the end; the way he glances questioningly upwards in fear and insecurity in that final scene.  To me, all of Existentialism in contained in that final scene on the beach.  

When I was a freshman at Purdue and all the guys in my dorm were getting to know each other, one guy (CB) said (about me) "He seems like the kind of guy that would just walk around naked if it was socially acceptable.  He just has that feel to him."  I took it as an insightful compliment at the time (I still do).

My whole life people have commented on my wardrobe being kind of boring or repetitive ("He always wore jeans" "Earth Tones Only?" "Umm, the 90's are calling - they want that sweater back, Ken"). I've always had an aversion to people judging me or making inferences about me based on the way I dressed so I always try to be very neutral and unremarkable in that way.

So, I'm not channeling The Hulk, I don't prefer to be naked, I don't chafe at the chains of mortality that bind me, but I am always trying to express my inner self: yearning to burst free (of those really cool snap button shirts).

Taking your word for it

If you give me permission, that is different from me giving my word, non?

I love these little hidden gems in language - especially the ones where I have had all the tools to figure it out myself but somehow have been too obtuse to connect the dots (see December, Quarantine, Turkey).

Lately, thanks to a rec from my bro, I've been reading my way through the Horatio Hornblower series. Early on, the protagonist is taken prisoner and when he asks to be released temporarily, the warden asks him for his "parole".  The French word for "word"  - which I have known all my life but never associated with our English word "parole" which is something we grant prisoners or the accused these days.

Hmmm.... methinks this might make an interesting blog post someday:  We used to give our word now we are granted it. Someday I'll have some profound insight on this and write about it, for now you'll just have to take my word for it...

 

Friendship

 Austin, TX 1997

Friends since 6th grade having coffee in the backyard in their late 20's

Photo creds: D. Finley